Who in their right mind would intentionally deploy non-deterministic, unreviewable and unprovable software to critical systems?
Anyway. To me it just speaks to the disdain for semi-intellectual work. People seem to think producing text has some value of its own. They think they can shortcircuit the basic assumption that behind every text is an intention that can be relied upon. They think that if they substitute this intention with a prompt, they can create the same value. I expect there to be some kind of bureaucratic collapse because of this, with parties unable to figure out responsibility around these zombie-texts. After that begins cleaning up, legislating and capturing in policy what the status of a given text is etc. Altman &co will have cashed out by then.
> People seem to think producing text has some value of its own.
Reading this sentence makes me think that the author actually never seen agentic work in action? Producing value out of text does work and one of good examples is putting it in a loop with some form of verification output. It's easy to do with programming - type checker, tests, linter etc. – so it can chat by itself with it's own results until the problem is solved.
I also find it personally strange that so often discussions require reminder that rate of change in capabilities is also big part of "the thing" (as opposed to pure capabilities today). It changes on weekly/monthly basis and it changes in one direction only.
the kind of people the parent comment was talking about tend to believe they can send three emails and make millions of pounds suddenly appear in business value (i’m being hyperbolic and grossly unfair but the premise is there).
they think the idea is far more valuable than the implementation - the idea is their bit (or the bit they’ve decided is their bit) and everyone else is there to make their fantastic idea magically appear out of thin air.
they aren’t looking at tests and don’t have a clue what a linter is (they probably think it’s some fancy device to keep lint off their expensive suits).
Their tech teams should know better, but it’s hard to say “no”, when it feels like your salary depends on you saying “yes”.
There's some truth to the difference between "short term profits" and "my salary depends on this" being whether you're the boss or the employee.
changing the input (data) means you get a different output (model).
source data has nothing to do with model determinism.
as an end-user of AI products, your perspective might be that the models are non-deterministic, but really it’s just different models returning different results … because they are different models.
“end-user non-determinism” is only really solved by repeatedly using the same version of a trained model (like a normal software dependency), potentially needing a bunch of work to upgrade the (model) dependency version later on.
But this interview is only fear-mongering to sell expensive models. Ditching the industry leaders.