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points by datsci_est_2015 1 day ago | 0 comments
This is a common rebuttal. But it falls flat, in my opinion, because LLMs appear to be a compression of language-based knowledge, and that compression is lossy. The result is that "knowledge" retrieved from the language-based storage model is biased towards the "average" idea.

As a concrete example, when you ask Claude Sonnet 5.5 to generate a small-to-medium-sized one-shot Python project, it will always fall into the same code patterns. Same structures of functions. Same file layout. Same package layout. They're not even good patterns, because if you throw a few common linters at it (e.g. flake8, isort, mypy) there are a ton of linting errors to clean up.

The only way that it escapes this mediocrity is through context. If you give it enough guardrails or sample data (e.g. Python code to emulate), it will start to go off in a "novel" direction that is defined by that context.

Now, what's the most likely way that "novelty" will be generated in an automated system like this? Randomly pulling in context and going for a random walk through the compressed language-based knowledge storage. It remains to be seen whether that's an effective way of producing more than just parlor tricks for investors. Human+LLM is overwhelmingly more novel and effective than only LLM.

[–] estearum 1 day ago
This doesn't even address the direct point. The question is how any of this is fundamentally different (difference in type and not just of "scale") from how human cognition works.
[–] datsci_est_2015 1 day ago
Well, I've addressed it implicitly. Every human collects different context by living one of 8.3 billion+ unique lives. We don't have 8.3 billion+ different LLMs. The only way to simulate that is to perform a random walk through the compressed language-based knowledge storage by injecting random context.

Also, those 8.3 billion+ unique lives already produce contexts that are highly optimized for solving human problems that modern humans experience in the physical universe most relevant to humans.

[–] pixl97 13 hours ago
So all you're saying is we need log term context in LLMs and then we could have 'trillion' of unique LLM paths.

If that's the only limitation that you're putting forward than LLMs have already won over humans. If you're not hoping for some quantum level limitations then it's already over for us.

[–] Diti 1 day ago
One opinionated answer to this question: LLMs can’t jump [1].

[1]: https://openreview.net/forum?id=klU4737opt

[–] unrented7977 1 day ago
All knowledge storage and retrieval is lossy. Oral histories are lossy. Lectures are lossy. On on one mentorships are lossy, writing or reading a textbook is lossy.

What's your point?

[–] hocusPokeUs 19 hours ago
Agree with this as language use is inherently an attempt to compress observations into a shared semantics

The syntax of math is overloaded so you need less syntax to write out something that would be verbose in English ...no one wants to make sense of arithmetic expressed in German syntax. May as well write all software in brainfuck.

Written literacy on a core language like we focus on today is not the historical norm. Creoles and local dialects have vanished in the US as we hyper-normalize everyone into Children of the Corn like carbon copy zombies of character traits