Comment by maplethorpe
Comment by maplethorpe 4 days ago
I do wonder if the calculator would have been as successful if it regularly delivered wrong answers.
Comment by maplethorpe 4 days ago
I do wonder if the calculator would have been as successful if it regularly delivered wrong answers.
>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.
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.