Comment by rezz
Comment by rezz 4 days ago
Why stop there? We could do long division before the calculator and hand write before the typewriter.
Comment by rezz 4 days ago
Why stop there? We could do long division before the calculator and hand write before the typewriter.
Calculators give wrong answers all the time. The differentiator from AI is that you can trust that a garbage answer from a calculator was caused by bad input, where bad AI answers aren't debuggable.
>Yes, but the machine itself is deterministic and logically sound.
Because arithmetic itself, by definition, is.
Human language is not. Which is why being able to talk to our computers in natural language (and have them understand us and talk back) now is nothing short of science fiction come true.
Even worse is if it's in the other room and your fingers can't reach the keys. It delivers no answers at all!
> LLM's are wrong way more often but are also more versatile than a calculator.
LLMs are wrong infinitely more than calculators, because calculators are never wrong (unless they're broken).
If you input "1 + 3" into your calculator and get "4", but you actually wanted to know the answer to "1 + 2", the calculator wasn't "wrong". It gave you the answer to the question you asked.
Now you might say "but that's what's happening with LLMs too! It gave you the wrong answer because you didn't ask the question right!" But an LLM isn't an all-seeing oracle. It can only interpolate between points in its training data. And if the correct answer isn't in its training data, then no amount of "using it with care" will produce the correct answer.
There's no such thing as a correct result to a search query. It certainly delivered exactly what was asked for, a grep of the web, sorted by number of incoming links.
They also don't use it at all anymore, they barely even care about your search query.
Google is successful, however, because they innovated once, and got enough money together as a result to buy Doubleclick. Combining their one innovation with the ad company they bought enabled them to buy other companies.
Did you learn how to do long division in schools? I did, and I wasn't allowed to use calculators on a test until I was in highschool and basic math wasn't what was being taught or evaluated.
I also learned long division in school.
I was allowed to use a calculator from middle school onward, when we were being tested on algebra and beyond and not arithmetic.
Some schools have ridiculous policies. Some don’t. Ymmv. I don’t think that’s changed from when I was in school.
I do wonder if the calculator would have been as successful if it regularly delivered wrong answers.