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by Nullabillity
949 days ago
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The difference is that all of them have theories and principles backing them, and we understand why they work. LLMs (and "AI" in general) are just bashing data together until you get something that looks correct (as long as you squint hard enough). Even putting them in the same category is incredibly insulting. |
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Yes there’s a significant statistical aspect involved in the workings of an AI, which distinguishes it from something more deterministic like syntactic sugar or a garbage collector. But I think one could argue that that’s the trade off for a more general tool like AI in the same way that giving a task to a junior dev is going to involve some noisiness in need of supervision. But in grand scheme of software development, is devs are in the end tools too, apart of the grand stack, and I think it’s reasonable to consider AI as just another tool in the stack. This is especially so if devs are already using it as a tool.
Dwelling on the principled v statistical distinction, while salient, may very well be a fallacy or irrelevant to the extent that we want to talk about the stack of tools and techniques software development employs. How much does the average developer understand or employ said understanding of a principled component of their stack? How predictable is that component, at least in the hands of the average developer making average but real software? When the end of the pipeline is a human and it’s human organisation of other humans, whether a tool’s principled or statistical may not matter much so long as it’s useful or productive.