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Comment by handoflixue | Hacker News Reader

> LLMs are literally stochastic by nature and can't be relied on for anything critical

Ahh, yes, unlike humans, who are completely deterministic, and thus can be trusted.

Humans can be governed by rules with consequences and replaced with individuals with a appropriate level of risk taking / rule following for the role.

Which has, famously, been a great consolation for people who suffered the consequences of human failure in the past

Rules and consequences seem to apply to humans in a similar way as prompts and harnesses govern LLMs. The greater the level of power a human possesses the less they are governed by these restraints, this doesnt apply to LLMs so at least in that aspect they are an improvement. But yea we can’t really punish or inflict pain on them - this seems like a problem

Why does it matter if you can inflict pain on them? Is that normal and acceptable in your line of work?

Being able to fire someone, thus causing potentially significant hardship, is considered quite normal and acceptable in most lines of work.

Yea I didn’t mean actual physical violence but rules need painful consequences in some way to be meaningful?

I think a simpler model is variety.

There are billions of people, you can interview/hire/fire until you get the right match.

There are 2? frontier LLM providers. 5? if you are more generous / ok with more trailing edge.

Everyone thought OpenAI was great, until Claude got better in Q1 and they switched to Anthropic, and then Codex got better and a good chunk moved back to OpenAI.. Seems kind of binary currently.

That seems like it applies just fine to LLMs as well: You can replace an LLM with a different model, different prompts, etc. for the appropriate level of risk taking. Rule following is even easier, given you can sandbox them.

Theres at best a handful of frontier models vs billions of people and millions of SWEs.

You clearly have never met a human

If you cannot get humans to do roughly what you want as a manager, good luck with LLMs.

Wow, such a nasty view to hold. What's next, the Altman's bullshit argument about "all the food" that the humans need to grow up and develop brain ? Humans are intelligent. Humans can generalise and invent new concepts, ideas and art. LLMs are none of that.

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