Re:YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design
by rsynnott on Saturday November 16, 2024 @01:37PM
(#42158168)
I mean, they were at one point making pretty extravagant claims about microwaves, but to a less credulous audience. Trouble with LLMs is that they look like magic if you don’t look too hard, particularly to laypeople. It’s far easier to buy into a narrative that they actually _are_ magic, or will become so.
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Re:YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design
by lxgr on Saturday November 16, 2024 @02:09PM
(#42158439)
I feel like what makes this a bit different from just regular old sufficiently advanced technology is the combination of two things:
- LLMs are extremely competent at surface-level pattern matching and manipulation of the type we'd previously assumed that only AGI would be able to do.
- A large fraction of tasks (and by extension jobs) that we used to, and largely still do, consider to be "knowledge work", i.e. requiring a high level of skill and intelligence, are in fact surface-level pattern matching and manipulation.
Reconciling these facts raises some uncomfortable implications, and calling LLMs "actually intelligent" lets us avoid these.