Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
8 hours ago
This is not wrong, but the "Bob and Alice" conundrum is not simple, either.
In academia, understanding is vital. The same for research.
But in production, results are what matters.
Alice would be a better researcher, but Bob would be a better producer. He knows how to wrangle the tools.
Each has its value. Many researchers develop marvelous ideas, but struggle to commercialize them, while production-oriented engineers, struggle to come up with the ideas.
You need both.
> You need both.
yea, there are multiple parts to education. 1) teach skills useful to the economy 2) teach the theories of the subject, and finally 3) tweak existing theories and create new ones. An electrician can fix problems without understanding theory of electromagnetism. These are the trades folks. A EE college graduate has presumably understood some theory, and can apply it in different useful ways. These are the engineers. Finally, there are folks who not only understand the theory of the craft, but can tweak it creatively for the future. These are the researchers.
Bob better fits as a trades-person or engineer whereas Alice fits better as a researcher.
I have to disagree that Bob will be a better producer, although I do agree that Bob will produce more. In this scenario, Bob isn't clear on which LLM output is valid and important and which is erroneous and misleading; I think that's a pretty critical distinction. It's the kind of thing that might go undetected for a long time, until a particular paper turns out to be important and it's discovered that it's also entirely wrong, wasting a lot of time and energy.
Sounds like you're still thinking of Bob as a researcher.
In production, there would be no "paper"; just some software/hardware product.
If there was a problem, that would be fairly obvious, with testing (we are going to be testing our products, right?).
I have been wrestling all morning, with an LLM. It keeps suggesting stuff that doesn't work, and I need to keep resetting the context.
I am often able to go in, and see what the issue is, but that's almost worthless. The most productive thing that I can do, is tell the LLM what is the problem, on the output end, and ask it to review and fix. I can highlight possible causes, but it often finds corner cases that I miss. I have to be careful not to be too dictatorial.
It's frustrating, as the LLM is like a junior programmer, but I can make suggestions that radically improve the result, and the total time is reduced drastically. I have gotten done, in about two hours, what might have taken all day.
If results are what matters, why is popular software so buggy and lacking in features?
Because people will pay for crap.
As long as that’s the case, those that create crap will thrive.
Pretty basic, and long predates LLMs.
People don't really have a choice. There is no free market and the incumbents are abusing their monopolists positions to further their wealth at the expense of the nation (and planet TBH).
Acting like workers have a meaningful choice where their director had to spend $30million on SalesForce licenses when people had no say in the matter just further proves that the last frontier for democracy will be in the private sector where we can liberate the workers against their tyrants and actually run the companies effectively rather than relying on the government to kneecap their competitors or straight up ignoring the law to the detriment of society + the planet.