Comment by kibwen
5 days ago
The Babbage anecdote isn't about ambiguous inputs, it's about wrong inputs. Imagine wanting to know the answer to 2+2, so you go up to the machine and ask "What is 3+3?", expecting that it will tell you what 2+2 is.
Adding an LLM as input to this process (along with an implicit acknowledgement that you're uncertain about your inputs) might produce a response "Are you sure you didn't mean to ask what 2+2 is?", but that's because the LLM is a big ball of likelihoods and it's more common to ask for 2+2 than for 3+3. But it's not magic; the LLM cannot operate on information that it was not given, rather it's that a lot of the information that it has was given to it during training. It's no more a breakthrough of fundamental logic than Google showing you results for "air fryer" when you type in "air frier".
I think the point they’re making is that computers have traditionally operated with an extremely low tolerance for errors in the input, where even minor ambiguities that are trivially resolved by humans by inferring from context can cause vastly wrong results.
We’ve added context, and that feels a bit like magic coming from the old ways. But the point isn’t that there is suddenly something magical, but rather that the capacity for deciphering complicated context clues is suddenly there.
> computers have traditionally operated with an extremely low tolerance for errors in the input
That's because someone have gone out of their way to mark those inputs as errors because they make no sense. The CPU itself has no qualms doing 'A' + 10 because what it's actually sees is a request is 01000001 (65) as 00001010 (10) as the input for its 8 bit adder circuit. Which will output 01001011 (75) which will be displayed as 75 or 'k' or whatever depending on the code afterwards. But generally, the operation is nonsense, so someone will mark it as an error somewhere.
So errors are a way to let you know that what you're asking is nonsense according to the rules of the software. Like removing a file you do not own. Or accessing a web page that does not exists. But as you've said, we can now rely on more accurate heuristics to propose alternatives solution. But the issue is when the machine goes off and actually compute the wrong information.