I think the issue is that LLMs can be so confidently and convincingly wrong about anything.
And if we (LLM tool operators) don’t know the subject matter in question, we can’t easily distinguish what they are right or wrong about.
And if we (LLM tool operators) don’t know the subject matter in question, we can’t easily distinguish what they are right or wrong about.
More broadly, LLMs or anything at all, needs a verifier. If the task can be automatically verified, great, then anyone can use them. If you can't automate the verification, then you need to be able to verify it using your knowledge. Knowledge required to verify is lower than the knowledge required to create in very few cases. This is why you still need a fully trained human verifier. We are yet to reorganise the overall "tasks" in the economy such that verification can be done with much lesser knowledge, for no reason other than that there was never demand for this until creation became automatic few years ago. It is possible and is slowly being done, there are many many startups working on automating verification in different fields and in many cases we will see fields reorganise themselves to be more amenable to automatic verification. Note that _effort_ required to verify is much lower than what is required to create, for almost anybody, and LLMs have economic use just due to that alone, albeit in the hands of a knowledgeable human.
Professor Tao also put out some YouTubes of him working with an older LLM to do Lean proofs, and his intelligence matters - things where I would be stuck for hours trying to understand what was failing in the model proof were just instantly clear to him and fixed in thirty seconds.
And I am an ok coder (rather than a bad maths grad student), but the LLM will happily thrash around the edges of a problem with me with no clear convergence when I don’t have that clear insight and the problem is weirdly presented enough; I still find the trick to walk around the block and disengage and then return knowing exactly what to do (now prompting it to the right thing) to be a super power for getting what I want out of the coding system.
Edit: do give counter examples if you have any in maths, physics, chemistry, biology etc
I think you guys are misunderstanding me, you can still talk to a llm to learn everything about physics or maths.
I asked Opus 4.8 to critique my algebra notes (these are definitely not masters level- just undergrad second year). It hallucinated an error it claimed I made in the notes and then put in a correction I didn't need because what I had written was correct.
What I said in my notes was:
Notice that a cyclic group is a degenerate (in the sense of "smallest
non-trivial") case of a finitely generated group where the generating set is
a singleton.
The point is I see the LLMs as a "smart friend"/colleague I can work with but I do think critically about what I get told and don't just take it as face value because it's not always correct for sure even in relatively basic cases like this.