Compilers also write code (they write machine code based on high level langs)… yet nobody asked the same question about them (or did they?)
AI needs to be instructed and then some kind of verification of the output is needed. Programmers do that
AI needs to be instructed and then some kind of verification of the output is needed. Programmers do that
AI will do the same thing in multiple ways or veer of course and do it another way based on spoken language with no strict syntax. It will make logical leaps, it will guess, it will assume etc.
These things are not equivalent at all.
The hallucinations point is a difference and one that we haven't quite learnt to handle yet. Generally, compilers are deterministic (even it it might not feel like it sometimes) and there's a lot of useful properties that come from that.
I have recently put Claude into a CI/CD pipeline and it's made me realise how much I rely on pipelines being deterministic.
Not really. Maybe more so than they used to be thanks to deterministic algorithms becoming faster, but most compilers still aren't deterministic by default. There are still advantages to non-determinism in compilers, like not having to worry about thread execution order. To be fair, most compilers these days allow you to optionally enable determinism. Then again, LLMs also allow you to optionally enable determinism.
really? Please explain
There caveat to that is where external inputs give the illusion of non-determinism. Thread execution order, like we already discussed, is one such example. Technically still deterministic if you understand the external inputs, but for the sake of discussion we can consider external inputs to be non-deterministic. Which is why compilers usually end up being non-deterministic by default. However, computers are designed to be deterministic so there are ways to avoid introducing those external inputs, albeit often at the cost of performance. LLMs and compilers alike can be run deterministically.
LLMs have one additional property not typically found in a traditional compiler — a call to rand() — but rand() is also deterministic when configured with a constant seed and can also be turned off completely by setting temperature to 0.
What's old is new again. LLMs are back to believing that the user doesn't really care what gets spit out, preferring performance over determinism, but it is likely that eventually we'll find increasing importance in reproducible builds again — especially when, like we saw with compilers, the hardware/algorithms catch up and the performance cost of determinism isn't there anymore. The industry is highly cyclical. These aren't hard technical limitations, just human choices mixed with a humorous dose of "this time is different". But in hindsight the times never end up being different, do they?
But this "reasoning" is done within a strict ruleset and includes "just find the optimum in X", and there is no space for "language interpretation", so I wouldnt call this reasoning compared to that type what LLMs are doing.
In order to consider LLMs to be something different then there needs to be a clear dividing line and I'm not sure that there is. It seems more likely that it is the same type of reasoning, but that LLMs take it to a further degree.