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points by cortesoft 2 days ago | 0 comments
When does a tool become "not just a tool"? Is there a complexity limit to what it can do before it becomes "more than a tool"?

If you had a tool that ONLY moralized on decisions, would that still be just a tool? Is the issue that it both does something else AND moralizes that is the issue?

I don't necessarily disagree that I personally don't want my tools to moralize, I don't know if that makes them categorically different or just a tool I don't want.

[–] thelaxiankey 2 days ago
Yes, there is a complexity limit, but it is fuzzy and not perfectly well defined (and that's ok). Modern LLMs ride that line in a wild and interesting way.

It's really fun having become a biologist in recent years, and knowing that there's an entire field that uses living organisms (yeast or neutered E coli) as protein factories. I am bringing it up a bunch here because not only are these things used as tools, but they're literally alive!

[–] PebblesRox 2 days ago
Makes me think of working animals, such as plow horses. Are they tools? Is there a better term for them that would also apply to LLMs?
[–] pizza234 2 days ago
It's not about complexity but architecture. Neural networks work in a fundamentally different way from imperative programs.

You can modify curl (a "tool") and predict how its behavior will change, with a high degree of certainty (bugs aside).

You can't modify a neural network in the same way. You can train it to behave in a certain way, there are no guarantees that it will consistently behave as intended.

More importantly, neural networks encode far more information and behavior than we can fully understand/identify - this is the fundamental reason why LLMs aren't just tools.