Have you ever tried to do the thing you learned without the LLM holding your hand?
Or are you just assuming you learned something because you made a finished product of some kind?
Or are you just assuming you learned something because you made a finished product of some kind?
This is where LLMs and even things like youtube videos muddle the difference between what you are and things you have to do as a human. The number of things you can be presented with in the modern world that you'd like, or have to do, is simply endless. If it's something small, with little opportunity cost if failure occurs, then just going to an LLM for an answer doesn't bother me. Now if it's something that's more costly like DIY remodeling an LLM isn't a primary driver, but in as a device that can push back when I ask about mistakes that can be made and what to watch out for.
And AI has that reputation!
You may argue what if LLMs are inaccessible but that’s like teachers saying “you won’t always have a calculator”
My problem is that filtering all of human creativity and expression through an LLM is ugly
They were right, though. For one, you still need to now what kind of equation to put into the calculator. If you don't know the concepts, what are you going to calculate. Real life situations don't actually spell out neat textbook questions.
And just take a look throughout the day how many quick maths you do subconsciously. Just things like cooking or grocery shopping have tons of moments where you just do the calculation in your head. And you can do that because you've learned how and when to do that.
It's not just a matter of "What if it's inaccessible", but also "Do you want to be dependent on your phone even more". Are just going to walk around with your phone on voice mode narrating your life into your LLM to let it tell you what to do?
They were not. I'm not dead yet so I suppose there's still a chance, but so far in decades of living life I've always had calculators when I've needed them.
> For one, you still need to now what kind of equation to put into the calculator.
That's a very different construct. Math concepts don't care how the arithmetic is performed.
> If you don't know the concepts, what are you going to calculate.
If you don't know the concepts, then what kind of arithmetic are you going to perform with anything -- whether the mind's eye, pencil and paper, a sliderule, or a pocket supercomputer?
It's definitely worth it for kids to invest the time it takes to learn the little shortcuts involved in mental math: that effort gets repaid many times over during the course of a normal human lifetime.
It was the same back then: Some quick mental math was often faster than using a calculator, so that's what I used first. The calculator came second.
I reject all notions that these are mutually-exclusive concepts.
Agreed; just because I "rarely" pull out the calculator doesn't mean I never use it. Sometimes my wife asks me "If this cake recipe calls for filling a 9-inch pan with batter, and makes 3 layers, but I have an 8.5-inch pan and I'm making two layers, then how much should I reduce the recipe?" The π terms cancel each other out in that math, but I still can't do (4.25×4.25×2) / (4.5×4.5×3) in my head faster than I can punch it into the calculator. (It comes out to about 0.59, BTW, meaning she should use either half or two-thirds of the recipe depending on if she wants a slightly thinner or thicker cake).
Bringing this back to the broader LLM-related discussion, the lesson I took away from the Fable kerfluffle was "the model will usually, but not always, be available." You might have an Internet connection hiccup, you might have hit your subscription usage credits for the week and not be willing to pay API pricing, the model might even be taken away from you. (Most of which are problems you won't face if you run a local model, but that's a different discussion). So just as it's important to learn mental math even when you have a calculator as backup, it's important to retain the skill to solve many categories of problems without the LLM, even if you still reach for the LLM for the categories of problems that it can solve faster than you can.
I don't think I'd want to rely upon having a rental pocket calculator to use. It could become unavailable at any time, for any reason. For something as common, inexpensive, and easy to find as pocket calculators have been for decades, renting one sounds crazy.
But that's the way that clown-based LLMs are: They're rented. They could disappear at any time.
And sure, I do use the bot to get some stuff done, anyway. I think of it as somewhat akin of the time-sharing computer systems of yore, where people absolutely rented (often far-away) computing resources to accomplish their work.
Those time-sharing systems were only temporary. The giants like Control Data Corp fell out of favor as computers became smaller, faster, and cheaper. (And then they came back in the shape of things like AWS, but that has a lot of non-technical things driving it; AWS is, strictly-speaking, completely optional.)
Unless we stop making computers smaller/faster/cheaper (which we haven't, despite the present-day supply/demand market blip) I think it is certain that we will get there again with LLMs, where the giants fall. Not this year, or next, but small systems will catch up.
And these little machines don't even have to win the race. They just have to be Good Enough.
So it seems inevitable that people like you and I will live to see fantastic local LLMs happening with affordable hardware that fits on a desk.
And then, eventually, into our pockets -- like a calculator.
P.S. If "clown-based LLMs" was an autocorrect-assisted typo for cloud-based, it was inspired. :-) If you typed that on purpose, it was also inspired. Have an upvote.
Before we get there, we'll have network connectivity to our desktop AI boxes at home. That's pretty good, too.
And if this clown-bot[1] boom is a bubble (as I believe it is), then it's just a matter of time before it pops. The blast radius is unknown, but at one end it seems likely to result in something between potentially-idle fabs that have already been mostly paid for. Idle factories are bad and it makes sense to avoid that even if it is expensive, so this means cheap hardware.
At the other end, it means failed companies with fabs that are sold for pennies on the dollar alongside a resolute unwillingness amongst the investors (who just had their asses handed to them) to start on Boom 2.0. This latter scenario would mean golden age of cheap hardware.
I think we'll be fine.
[1]: Yeah, clown is on purpose. It fits as a replacement in any technical parlance where "cloud" would be used. :)
... And I've just been agreeing with you on all points with this comment, haven't I? Time to wrap up the discussion, then: once total agreement is reached then there's not much point in continuing the discussion unless someone has something new to say, and I don't have anything new to say on this topic. See you around.
Sure, a teacher framing the necessity of learning math as "you don't always have calculator" is pretty lazy answer that doesn't really get to the point. In my experience, teachers rarely even made this point, students did that tried to argue that Mathematics was pointless when you have calculators.
But my point was that actually knowing these concepts is good for complex reasoning you can do in all aspects of life. Whether you have the calculator with you or not.