DO NOT talk about the goblins

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DO NOT talk about the goblins

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Non-deterministic software is fine and we’ve been using it for ages. It’s usable when:

  • The base error rate is low enough
  • Accuracy is not important
  • The outcome is cheap to verify by some other means

That rules out several applications of current LLMs, but it rules in several others.

If I have to verify the output of an AI then unless I can do the verification in 30 seconds but work would somehow take me hours then it’s not useful. I can’t think of many scenarios in which verification is fast but the work itself is slow.

This can be the case for coding. A good example is when the change is simple but involves a library you’re unfamiliar with. You can set it off and not have to read any docs, and it will be easy to check if it got the API right.

Elsewhere I gave the example of copyediting. It’s a lot quicker to check the output than to refine it yourself.

Easy-to-verify tasks are everywhere I think. Not at the scale of seconds versus hours, but seconds versus minutes




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