Comment by germandiago
5 hours ago
My bet: LLMs will never be creative and will never be reliable.
It is a matter of paradigm.
Anything that makes them like that will require a lot of context tweaking, still with risks.
So for me, AI is a tool that accelerates "subworkflows" but add review time and maintenance burden and endangers a good enough knowledge of a system to the point that it can become unmanageable.
Also, code is a liability. That is what they do the most: generate lots and lots of code.
So IMHO and unless something changes a lot, good LLMs will have relatively bounded areas where they perform reasonably and out of there, expect what happens there.
We don't even know what 'creativity' is, and most humans I know are unable to be creative even when compelled to be.
AI is 'creative enough' - whether we call it 'synthetic creativity' or whatever, it definitely can explore enough combinations and permutations that it's suitably novel. Maybe it won't produce 'deeply original works' - but it'll be good enough 99.99% of the time.
The reliability issue is real.
It may not be solvable at the level of LLM.
Right now everything is LLM-driven, maybe in a few years, it will be more Agentically driven, where the LLM is used as 'compute' and we can pave over the 'unreiablity'.
For example, the AI is really good when it has a lot of context and can identify a narrow issue.
It gets bad during action and context-rot.
We can overcome a lot of this with a lot more token usage.
Imagine a situation where we use 1000x more tokens, and we have 2 layers of abstraction running the LLMs.
We're running 64K computers today, things change with 1G of RAM.
But yes - limitations will remian.
Maybe I do not have a good definition for it.
But what I see again and again in LLMs is a lot of combinations of possible solutions that are somewhere around internet (bc it put that data in). Nothing disruptive, nothing thought out like an experimented human in a specific topic. Besides all the mistakes/hallucinations.
I think the terminology is just dogshit in this area. LLMs are great semantic searchers and can reason decently well - I'm using them to self teach a lot of fields. But I inevitably reach a point where I come up with some new thoughts and it's not capable of keeping up and I start going to what real people are saying right now, today, and trust the LLM less and instead go to primary sources and real people. But I would have never had the time, money, or access to expertise without the LLM.
Constantly worrying, "is this a superset? Is this a superset?" Is exhausting. Just use the damn tool, stop arguing about if this LLM can get all possible out of distribution things that you would care about or whatever. If it sucks, don't make excuses for it, it sucks. We don't give Einstein a pass for saying dumb shit either, and the LLM ain't no Einstein
If there's one thing to learn from philosophy, it's that asking the question often smuggles in the answer. Ask "is it possible to make an unconstrained deity?" And you get arguments about God.
it won't be creative because it's a transformer, it's like a big query engine.
it's a tool like everything else we've gotten before, but admittedly a much more major one
but "creativity" must come from either it's training data (already widely known) or from the prompts (i.e. mostly human sources)