Comment by rexer
3 days ago
I read the full article (really resonated with it, fwiw), and I'm struggling to understand the issues you're describing.
> Yes of course relationship questions don’t have a “correct” answer. But physics questions do. Code vulnerability questions do. Math questions do. I mean seriously?
Can you say more? It seems to me the article says the same thing you are.
> I don’t actually think the above paragraph makes any sense, does anyone disagree with me? “Instead of planning we observe and hypothesize”?
I think the author is drawing a connection to the world of science, specifically quantum mechanics, where the best way to make progress has been to describe and test theories (as opposed to math where we have proofs). Though it's not a great analog since LLMs are not probabilistic in the same way quantum mechanics is.
In any case, I appreciated the article because it talks through a shift from deterministic to probabilistic systems that I've been seeing in my work.
Sure, but it's overblown. People have been reasoning about and building probabilistic systems formally since the birth of information theory back in the 1940s. Many systems we already rely on today are highly stochastic in their own ways.
Yes, LLMs are a bit of a new beast in terms of the use of stochastic processes as producers—but we do know how to deal with these systems. Half the "novelty" is just people either forgetting past work or being ignorant of it in the first place.
> Half the "novelty" is just people either forgetting past work or being ignorant of it in the first place.
We also see this in cryptocurrencies. The path to forgetting is greased by the presence of money and fame, and at some later time they are eventually forced to "discover" the same ancient problems they insisted couldn't possibly apply.
Truly appreciate the perspective. Any pointers to previous work on dealing with stochastic systems from the past? Part of my work is securing AI workloads, and it seems like losing determinism throws out a lot of assumptions in previously accepted approaches.