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Comment by saghm

2 days ago

That seems overly pedantic to me. If I asked you "What's your prediction for the Super Bowl?", I'm pretty confident you would infer that I mean predicting the outcome, not the event itself.

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saghm

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jameshart  2 days ago

But if you are an NFL coach and I ask you to decide your next action in order to maximize your odds of winning the superbowl, while yes that does involve you having some predictive ability to think about what impact your actions would have on your odds of winning the Super Bowl… I don’t think you would call the process that you use to decide that next action ‘prediction’.

  • saghm  2 days ago

    I don't find the fact that I don't call any humans "action predictors" to be a particularly meaningful insight because my rationale is that it's a weird thing to call a human; football coaches can do plenty of other things besides just coaching football.

    • jameshart  2 days ago

      Yep, we’re all just putting one foot in front of the other, hoping we’re doing the right thing to bring about the outcomes we want, trying our best.

      But that’s the point: so is an LLM. Putting one token in front of another, hoping it’s doing the right thing to bring about the rewards it’s trained to… trying its best.

      So yeah, not ‘next token predictors’. ‘Next token tryers’ maybe.

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