Comment by kmijyiyxfbklao
14 hours ago
Since there are no humans involved, it's more like growing a tree. Sure it's good to know how trees grow, but not knowing about cells didn't stop thousands of years of agriculture.
14 hours ago
Since there are no humans involved, it's more like growing a tree. Sure it's good to know how trees grow, but not knowing about cells didn't stop thousands of years of agriculture.
The Gas Town piece reminded me of this as well. The author there leaned into role playing, social and culture analogies, and it made a lot more sense than an architecture diagram in which one node is “black box intelligence” with a single line leading out of it…
Very interesting analogy
Except that the tree is so malformed and the core structure so unsound that it can't grow much past its germination and dies of malnourishment because since you have zero understanding of biology, forestry and related fields there is no knowledge to save it or help it grow healthy.
Also out of nowhere an invasive species of spiders that was inside the seed starts replicating geometrically and within seconds wraps the whole forest with webs and asks for a ransom in order to produce the secret enzyme that can dissolve it. Trying to torch it will set the whole forest on fire, brute force is futile. Unfortunately, you assumed the process would only plagiarize the good bits, but seems like it also sometimes plagiarizes the bad bits too, oops.
Its not like tree at all because tree is one and done.
Code is a project that has to be updated, fixed, etc.
So when something breaks - you have to ask the contractor again. It may not find an issue, or mess things up when it tries to fix it making project useless, etc.
Its more like a car. Every time something goes wrong you will pay for it - sometimes it will get back in even worse shape (no refunds though), sometimes it will cost you x100 because there is nothing you can do, you need it and you can't manage it on your own.
Trees are not static, unchanging, pop into existence and forget about, things. Trees that don't get regular "updates" of adequate sunlight, water, and nutrients die. In fact, too much light or water could kill it. Or soil that is not the right courseness or acidity level could hamper or prevent growth. Now add "bugs". Literal bugs, diseases, and even competing plants that could eat, poison, or choke the tree. You might be thinking of trees that are indigenous to an area. Even these compete for the resources and plagues of their area, but are more apt than the trees accustom to different environments, and even they go through the cycle of life. I think his analogy was perfect, because this is the first time coding could resemble nature. We are just used to the carefully curated human made code, as there has not been such a thing as naturally occuring, no human interaction, code before
I wouldn't say it is a tree as such as at least trees are deterministic where input parameters (seed, environment, sunlight) define the output.
LLM outputs are akin to a mutant tree that can decide to randomly sprout a giant mushroom instead of a branch. And you won't have any idea why despite your input parameters being deterministic.
You haven't done a lot of gardening if you don't know plants get 'randomly' (there's a biological explanation, but with the massive amounts of variables it feels random) attacked by parasites all the time. Go look at pot growing subreddits, they spend an enormous chunk of their time fighting mites.
Determinism is not strictly anti-randomness (though I can see why one can confuse it to be polar opposites). Rather we do not even have true randomness (at least not proven) and should actually be called pseudorandom. Determinism just means that if you have the same input parameters (considering all parameters have been accounted for), you will get the same result. In other words, you can start with a particular random seed (pseudorandom seed to be precise) and always end up with the same end result and that would be considered deterministic.
> You haven't done a lot of gardening if you don't know plants
I grow "herbs".
> there's a biological explanation
Exactly. There is always an explanation for every phenomena that occurs in this observable, physical World. There is a defined cause and effect. Even if it "feels random". That's not how it is with LLMs. Because in between your deterministic input parameters and the output that is generated, there is a black box: the model itself. You have no access to the billions of parameters within the models which means you are not sure you can always reproduce the output. That black box is what causes non-determinism.
EDIT: just wanted to add - "attacked by parasites all the time", is why I said if you have control over the environment. Controlling environment encompasses dealing with parasites as well. Think of well-controlled environment like a lab.
2 replies →
In what world are trees deterministic? There are a set of parameters that you can control that give you a higher probability of success, but uncontrollable variables can wipe you out.
Explained here [1]. We live in a pseudorandom World. So everything is deterministic if you have the same set of input parameters. That includes trees as well.
I am not talking about controllable/uncontrollable variables. That has no bearing on whether a process is deterministic in theory or not. If you can theoretically control all variables (even if you practically cannot), you have a deterministic process as you can reproduce the entire path: from input to output. LLMs are currently a black box. You have no access to the billions of parameters within the model, making it non-deterministic. The day we have tools where we can control all the billions of parameters within the model, then we can retrace the exact path taken, thereby making it deterministic.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663052