[galaxytachyon]

You know, the more I read about these things, the more I realize we are literally getting close to "spells" technology.

This is literally an entire paper about constructing a specific incantation to create an effect. Neither the author nor the LLM maker can completely deconstruct and trace every steps of the process from the input to the output. They only know how to chant a litany, add a request, chant another litany, then look at the output and hope they didn't summon Satan.

[amelius]

Yes, this is the distinction. In the past, we did our best to find guarantees about the things we invented. E.g. in control theory we would analytically find the limits of a system's inputs and performance, in CS we would determine bounds on the worst case performance, etc. But nowadays we just dump everything into a giant black box and call it a day.

[DistractionRect]

Indeed, and we can even summon familiars, though care must be taken that we don't summon something like Microsofts Tay.

[drittich]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

[amelius]

> “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

"... even to its creators"

-- me

[gflan]

Except Clarke wasn't referring to the black-boxiness of said advanced tech, was he?

[michaelmior]

Not explicitly, I think no. But in some sense, yes. Arguably any tech which we don't really understand is a black box. I think the lack of understanding how something works is a large part of the "magical" effect.

[visarga]

I think LLM smarts is actually language smarts. Language is accessible, we can track how it creates these capabilities.

[michaelmior]

> we can track how it creates these capabilities.

Could you explain what you mean here? To the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been much success in successfully explaining how LLMs actually work? Of course we know all the low level mathematical details, we built them. But my understanding is that we don't really know much about the structure of LLM parameters and how they relate to the concepts the model is supposedly learning.

[piecerough]

Nice, one would expect so. Though if you think more deeply about it, I think not. The language itself is the manifestation of capabilities, but the process exhibiting them is the underlying system, eg. neural nets or human brain.

[yk]

Charlie Stross had an essay about that ten years ago. (I wanted to submit it to HN for a few month now, so thanks for the reminder.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37438398

[Legend2440]

>You can't credibly learn to service a modern automobile in your own garage.

Sure you can, that's how my brother learned to be a mechanic.

[internet101010]

It's like Skyrim mod that turns shouts into farts.

[jnwatson]

You win the Internet today.

Still, there's a deeper analogy here. Very much in the "enshittification" vein, today's tech companies are about making something cool, getting folks to use it, and then monetizing while gradually turning said cool thing into a bad parody of itself.

[zelias]

"words are power"

-- someone wise

[lawlessone]

alternatively "lets work on this step by step" sounds like an adult encouraging a child on how they can solve a big problem by breaking it into smaller problems.