Comment by kyle_grove

IMO the lack of real version control and lack of reliable programmability have been significant impediments to impact and adoption. The control surfaces are more brittle than say, regex, which isn’t a good place to be.

I would quibble that there is a modicum of design in prompting; RLHF, DPO and ORPO are explicitly designing the models to be more promptable. But the methods don’t yet adequately scale to the variety of user inputs, especially in a customer-facing context.

My preference would be for the field to put more emphasis on control over LLMs, but it seems like the momentum is again on training LLM-based AGIs. Perhaps the Bitter Lesson has struck again.