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> but it also can make the LLM worse at other tasks

The problem is easily avoided by not using it for other tasks.

Users often found it hard to know exactly where the boundaries are.

This is a reason why general purpose models shine. You don’t have to carefully characterize a task and put guard rails around it.

There is also a reason why you don’t have general purpose applications. Most users understand that Excel is for data tables and Paint is for images even though some people have fun playing with the boundary and creating Excel paintings.

This is exactly the intuition that leads to excitement about fine tuning.

However, I personally think that this intuition applies to products and interfaces, not to AI.

Intelligence and learning is general. Intelligence without generalization is memorization, which seems to be less useful in practice.

What people use are products and interfaces, not "AI".

Interesting you bring up Excel. ChatGPT's chat interface is going to be Excel for the AI era. Everyone knows there's a better interface to be had, but it just works.

In the pre-AI era Excel was not « the » interface. Most people didn’t use Excel at all!

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