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Comment by bluegatty | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's reasonable to really talk about the fact that in theory, AI can take a user message, save it in some random place, and ingest it later.

I think we get that.

It's completley unreliable, which is the issue.

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It's not in theory, this capability exists in practice, and you have no clue whether this specific instruction will work in 90, 99, or 99.9% of cases.

I think it's unreasonable to pretend that this couldn't possibly work, that you understand to what degree it does work, and that the only thing we should be discussing here was that it isn't deterministic, which every reader already knows.

No, this is upside down.

Your argument exemplified by 'the ai can write to a file and use that information in context later' - implies a 'capability' to do theoretically do something, but not with any consistency at all.

Not in any scenario - even with human oversight - would be 'trust' any system to reliably work on the basis of arbitrary memory.

'It can possibly work' does not map to any reasonable conclusion that it will work with any degree of fidelity.

There are almost no examples where we rely on AI in this way. Chatbots for customer engagements etc. are merely thin language wrappers around deterministic systems.

It's 'possible' that Meta is doing something rigorous and deterministic but it's not remotely reasonable to make that assertion because we literally have the evidence right in front of us. That's literally what the article is about.

The Wright Brothers plane 'technically took flight' but it's not reasonable to conclude that it can fly passengers safely in any way, especially when the story is about a flight crashing.

It would be novel actually, if there were a story about Meta's unique use of AI in these kinds of information flows, that transcended what we all recognize as AI's inability to reliably process information, given what we know about AI and how it works aka 'it can write to memory'.

A substantive discussion would focus on whether Meta's Muse agent does indeed have a memory feature, whether the user's request to 'never do this again' triggers it, and how good their Muse model and harness is at following such instructions.

The discussion was good to read. You seem to not want to understand that appending text to a file called MEMORY.md or whatever name doesn't reliably work and would cause another "that's on me"

No, the millionth rehash of "LLMs are not deterministic" was not interesting to read, and if you want to hear rants about how Zuckerberg markets his products, there are surely better platforms than HN.

Here I expect factual discussion rather than misleading statements that suggest there was no way for the Muse assistant to follow an instruction never to do something again.

Vague arguments that such instructions are not deterministic are uninteresting, because it is obvious.

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