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Comment by y0eswddl

10 hours ago

Yeah, they're great at interpolation - they'll just never be worth much at extrapolation.

Luckily for us, whole fortunes can be made by filling in the blanks between what we know and what we realize.

  • That deserves to be on a plaque somewhere.

    I've been using LLMs for much the same purpose: solving problems within my field of expertise where the limiting factor is not intelligence per se, but the ability to connect the right dots from among a vast corpus of knowledge that I would never realistically be able to imbibe and remember over the course of a lifetime.

    Once the dots are connected, I can verify the solutions and/or extend them in creative ways with comparatively little effort.

    It really is incredible what otherwise intractable problems have become solvable as a result.

  • And by having more of those blanks filled humans might be able to come up with much better extrapolations than what we have right now.

People keep saying this, but the only ways I know of for formalizing this statement, appear to be probably false?

I don’t know what this claim is supposed to mean.

If it isn’t supposed to have a precise technical meaning, why is it using the word “interpolate”?