Comment by 9rx
4 hours ago
> I believe to count as an expert on something you need to have a ready compendium of knowledge ready to go.
You are certainly headed in the right direction, but not quite. To be seen as an expert in the eyes of others you need to have had a vision for something and to have successfully executed on it. If the vision was dependent on calculus, then you will have reached a point where you had to learn something about calculus, of course...
But that's different to having a taskmaster tell you to learn calculus for no apparent reason. Even if you follow through and built up a huge wealth of knowledge from it, you would still not be deemed an expert by others. You're no different than an encyclopedia, which isn't an expert either. It is being able to see things others can't and the ability to act upon it that makes an expert.
Learning taking place when you need it isn't the same as never.
> Maybe when we have supremely reliable LLMs that can replace humans we might not but we’re not there yet.
Frankly, even Page Rank already replaced humans for this. But LLMs are even better at it. Humans are just that poorly performing. Like I said before, even someone doing nothing in life but looking for what exists in the world could not take in as much as databases that have indexed every written thing.
Calculus might not be the best analogy for my point since it’s pretty fundamental. When I think of an expert I think of an accomplished mathematician or a chemist, someone that can build on existing knowledge to provide new breakthroughs. You can ask an LLM for a particular formulation but you cannot make wide spanning connections to come up with something novel until you have a good understanding of a given space. Not all progress is a series of iterative problems and tasks that need to be solved. In fact for a lot of breakthroughs it’s making disparate connections.
> When I think of an expert I think of an accomplished mathematician or a chemist, someone that can build on existing knowledge to provide new breakthroughs.
I think we're on the same page here. Experts have both vision and execution. Someone who has simply learned a bunch of things, or a lot about one thing, is not what we consider an expert.
> You can ask an LLM for a particular formulation but you cannot make wide spanning connections to come up with something novel until you have a good understanding of a given space.
I don't get where you are trying to go with this. Using an LLM (or Page Rank for that matter) to search for tools that have been created/discovered necessary to fulfill execution of your vision seems to have nothing to do with what you are trying to say. Nobody would ask an LLM to do what you are suggesting, if I am understanding you correctly. LLMs are most definitely not good at that. That is AGI territory.