Hacker News Reader

Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

That seems overly pedantic to me. If I asked you "What's your prediction for the Super Bowl?", I'm pretty confident you would infer that I mean predicting the outcome, not the event itself.

View on HN

But if you are an NFL coach and I ask you to decide your next action in order to maximize your odds of winning the superbowl, while yes that does involve you having some predictive ability to think about what impact your actions would have on your odds of winning the Super Bowl… I don’t think you would call the process that you use to decide that next action ‘prediction’.

I don't find the fact that I don't call any humans "action predictors" to be a particularly meaningful insight because my rationale is that it's a weird thing to call a human; football coaches can do plenty of other things besides just coaching football.

Yep, we’re all just putting one foot in front of the other, hoping we’re doing the right thing to bring about the outcomes we want, trying our best.

But that’s the point: so is an LLM. Putting one token in front of another, hoping it’s doing the right thing to bring about the rewards it’s trained to… trying its best.

So yeah, not ‘next token predictors’. ‘Next token tryers’ maybe.

There's a pretty huge difference in our understanding of the methodology of how LLMs make decisions and how humans make decisions, so I don't understand why you're arguing that anything about how humans make decisions is relevant to the terminology we use for LLMs.

Predict implies you don't control a situation. That's the difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com