Comment by dartos

1 year ago

So… we’re at expert systems again?

That’s how the AI winter started last time.

What is an "expert system" to you? In AI they're just series of if-then statements to encode certain rules. What non-trivial part of an LLM reaching out to a chess AI does that describe?

  • The initial LLM acts as an intention detection mechanism switch.

    To personify LLM way too much:

    It sees that a prompt of some kind wants to play chess.

    Knowing this it looks at the bag of “tools” and sees a chess tool. It then generates a response which eventually causes a call to a chess AI (or just chess program, potentially) which does further processing.

    The first LLM acts as a ton of if-then statements, but automatically generated (or brute-forcly discovered) through training.

    You still needed discrete parts for this system. Some communication protocol, an intent detection step, a chess execution step, etc…

    I don’t see how that differs from a classic expert system other than the if statement is handled by a statistical model.