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Comment by Too

1 year ago

While the A:B problem technically was solved, look at the solutions, they are several hundreds lines of prompts, rephrasing the problem to the point that a human doesn't understand it any more. Even with a thorough review, nobody can guarantee if the prompts are going to work or not, most of them didn't, 90% pass was considered good enough. The idea of AI is to reduce work, not create more, otherwise what's the point.

In the meantime, it took me about 2 minutes and 0 guesswork to write a straightforward and readable solution in 15 lines of Python. This i know for sure will work 100% of the time and not cost $1 per inference.

Reminds me about some early attempts to have executable requirements specifications or model-based engineering. Turns out, expressing the problem is half the problem, resulting in requirements often longer and more convoluted than the code that implements them, code being a very efficient language to express solutions and all their edge cases, free from ambiguity.

Don't get me wrong here, LLMs are super useful for certain class of questions. The boundaries of what it can not do need to be understood better, to keep the AI-for-everything hype at bay.

I guess the problem is that if you need to teach it tricks for each novel problem still after training then that model can not be a general intelligence. It could still be useful though