Comment by chii

Comment by chii a day ago

4 replies

> your car is non-deterministic

it's not as far as your experience goes - you press pedal, it accelerates. You turn the steering, it goes the way it turns. What the car does is deterministic.

More importantly, it does this every time, and the amount of turning (or accelerating) is the same today as it was yesterday.

If an LLM interpreted those inputs, can you say with confidence, that you will accelerate in a way that you predicted? If that is the case, then i would be fine with an LLM interpreted input to drive. Otherwise, how do you know, for sure, that pressing the brakes will stop the car, before you hit somebody in front of you?

of course, you could argue that the input is no longer your moving the brake pads etc - just name a destination and you get there, and that is suppose to be deterministic, as long as you describe your destination correctly. But is that where LLM is at today? or is that the imagined future of LLMs?

iliaxj 19 hours ago

Sometimes it doesn't though. Sometimes the engine seizes because a piece of tubing broke and you left your coolant down the road two turns ago. Or you steer off a cliff because there was coolant on the road for some reason. Or the meat sack in front of the wheel just didn't get enough sleep and your response time is degraded and you just can't quite get the thing to feel how you usually do. Ultimately the failure rate is low enough to trust your life on it, but that's just a matter of degree.

  • pepoluan 19 hours ago

    The situations you described reflects a System that has changed. And if the System has changed, then a change in output is to be expected.

    It's the same as having a function called "factorial" but you change the multiplication operation to addition instead.

  • chii 18 hours ago

    all of those situations are the "driver's own fault", because they could've had a check to ensure none of that happened before driving. Not true with an LLM (at least, not as of today).

crote a day ago

Tesla's "self-driving" cars have been working very hard to change this. That piece of road it has been doing flawlessly for months? You're going straight into the barrier today, just because it feels like it.