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Cake day: April 6th, 2024

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  • Since you are a software engineer you must know the difference between deterministic software like a spellchecker and something stochastic like an LLM. You must also understand the difference between a well defined process like a spellchecker and an undefined behavior like an LLM hallucinating. Now ask your LLM if comparing these two technologies in the way you are is a bad analogy. If the LLM says it is a good analogy then you are prompting it wrong. The fact that we can’t agree on what an LLM should say on this matter and that we can get it to say either outcome demonstrates that an LLM cannot distinguish fact from fiction, rather it makes these determinations on what is effectively a vibe check.


  • But doctors and nurses’ minds effectively hallucinate just the same and are prone to even the most trivial of brain farts like fumbling basic math or language slip-ups

    The difference is that the practitioner can distinguish the difference from hallucination from fact while an LLM cannot.

    We can’t underestimate the capacity to have the strengths of a supercomputer at least acting as a double-checker on charting, can we?

    A supercomputer is only as powerful as it’s programming. This is avoiding the whole “if you understand the problem then you are better off writing a program than using an LLM” by hand waving in the word “supercomputer”. The whole “train it better” doesn’t get away from this fact either.