> a set of rules, roles, and workflows that make its output predictable and valuable.
Let me stop you right there. Are you seriously talking about predictable when talking about a non-deterministic black box over which you have no control?
> Are you seriously talking about predictable when talking about a non-deterministic
Predictability and determinism are related but different concepts.
A system can be predictable in a probabilistic sense, rather than an exact, deterministic one. This means that while you may not be able to predict the precise outcome of a single event, you can accurately forecast the overall behavior of the system and the likelihood of different outcomes.
Similarly, a system can be deterministic yet unpredictable due to practical limitations like sensitivity to initial conditions (chaos theory), lack of information, or the inability to compute predictions in time.
The topic of chaos is underrated when people talk about deterministic systems, but I think it's at least (usually?/always?) a tractable problem to draw up a fractal or something and find the non-chaotic regions of a solution space. You have nice variables to work with when you draw up a model of the problem.
Maybe someone can elaborate better, but it seems there is no such luck trying to map probability onto problems the way "AI" is being used today. It's not just a matter of feeding it more data, but finding what data you haven't fed it or in some cases knowing you can't feed it some data because we have no known way to represent what is obvious to humans.
From the discussion in the link: "Predictability means that you can figure out what will happen next based on what happened previously."
Having used nearly all of the methods in the original article, I can predict that the output of the model is nearly indistinguishable from a coin toss for many, many, many rather obvious reasons.
Yes, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Living creatures are mostly black boxes. It doesn't mean we don't aim for making medicine with predictable effects (and side effects).
Having biology degrees doesn't make you understand every detail of human body. There are many, many drugs that are known to work (by double blind testing) but we don't know exactly how.
The details of how penicillin kills bacteria were discovered in 2000s. Only about half a century of after its commercial production. And I'm quite sure we'll still see some more missing puzzle pieces in the future.
Yes, but I think we want to know how they work? Not knowing "exactly how" but having a good ballpark idea is not equivalent to letting AI throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
Maybe you can try to read other comments below your original comment, as they mostly share the same point and I don't bother to repeat what everyone else has said.
I'll put it concisely:
Trying to build predictable result upon unpredictable, not fully understood mechanisms is an extremely common practice in every single field.
But anyway you think LLM is just coin toss so I won't engage with this sub-thread anymore.
And you should read replies to those replies, including yours.
Nothing in the current AI world is as predictable as, say, the medicine you can buy or you get prescribed. None of the shamanic "just one more prompt bro" rituals have the predicting power of physics laws. Etc.
You could reflect on that.
> But anyway you think LLM is just coin toss
A person telling me to "try to read comments" couldn't read and understand my comment.
> Nothing in the current AI world is as predictable as, say, the medicine you can buy or you get prescribed.
Do you know there are approve drugs that have been put in the market for treating one ailment and that have proven to have effect on another or have been shown to have unwanted side effect, and therefore have been shifted? The whole drugs _market_ is full of them and all that is needed is to have enough trial to prove desired effect...
The LLM output is yours to decide if it is relevant to your work or not, but it seems that your experience is consistently subpar with what others have reported.
> all that is needed is to have enough trial to prove desired effect
all that is needed lol. You mean multi-stage trials with baselines, control groups, testing against placebos etc.?
Compared to "yolo just believe me" of LLMs.
> The LLM output is yours to decide if it is relevant to your work or not, but it seems that your experience is consistently subpar with what others have reported.
Indeed, because all we have to do with those reports is have blind unquestionable faith. "Just one more prompt, and I swear it will be 100% more efficient with literally othing to judge efficiency by, no baselines, nothing".
Nah. The only thing we can establish precisely at the lowest levels is probability. We can and do engineer systems to maximize probabilities of desired outcomes and minimize probabilities of undesirable ones.
Frankly I don’t understand how software engineers (not coders mind you) can have issues with non deterministic tools while browsing the web on a network which can stop working anytime for any reason.
Because the failure modes are deterministic. An API can be down, which you can easily plan for, but if it's up and returning a 200, you can reasonably expect it to return what it's supposed to.
Would you say a top tier human developer produces predictable output? I would, in the sense that it will be well designed and implemented code that meets the requirements. Can we guess every variable name and logic choice? Probably not.
> First you'd have to prove that LLMs can be equated to a "top tier human developer"
Huh? Can you elaborate? I thought the claim was that predictable output is the gold standard and variance in LLM output means they can never rival humans.
Please restate if I missed why deterministic output is so important.
Huh? I guarantee you, if you give two different developers tbe exact sane set of requirements, that you’d get two very different programs. Try it. They likely perform differently also, performance- or resource-wise.
Would you still call that predictable? Of course you would, as long as they meet your requirements. Put it another way, anything is unpredictable depending on your level of scrutiny. AI is likely less predictable than human, doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful. You are free to dismiss it of course.
Let me stop you right there. Are you seriously talking about predictable when talking about a non-deterministic black box over which you have no control?