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Comment by nadermx | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think comparing a LLM to a calculator is necessarily apt. If anything i'd say you can use these LLM's as a reflection of you. If you think Alabama has an R. Then it's not maths fault it tries to find an answer that matches your persistence, especially since I'm sure somewhere in its training set alabamer exists.

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I'd personally liken it to expecting planes to fly like birds do.

Perhaps this is a good analogy, in which case I'd prefer they stop advertising it as a better/faster/cheaper bird. Speaking as a metaphorical bird, it clearly cannot do well what I do. It does do it poorly at a remarkable speed though.

So what is the software development task that this plane excels at? Other than bullshitting one's manager.

Then it's not maths fault it tries to find an answer that matches your persistence, especially since I'm sure somewhere in its training set alabamer exists.

It is not supposed to find an answer that matches my persistence, its supposed to tell the truth or admit that it does not know. And even if there is an alabamer in the training set, that is either something else, not a US state, or a misspelling, in neither case should it end up on the list.

No, it is supposed to find an answer that matches your persistence. That's what it does, and understanding that is the key to understanding its strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise you may just keep drinking the investors' kool-aid and pretend that it's a tool that's supposed to tell the truth. That's not what it does, that's not how it works and it's a safe bet that's not how it's gonna work in foreseeable future.

No, it is supposed to tell the truth and that is what is advertised, matching your persistence is what it sometimes actually does. But people are using it because it sometimes tells the truth, not because it sometimes matches your persistence.

Then they're just confused by false marketing. LLMs predict plausible text, that's all they do. Anything else is a side effect.

When the marketing tells us it's like talking to a PhD in the relevant field on any topic, it's worth pointing out that's only true if the PhD in question has recently suffered severe head trauma.

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