[r3trohack3r]

I feel like it's the difference between something that has been engineered and something that has been discovered.

I feel like most of our industry up until now has been engineered.

LLMs were discovered.

[herval]

LLMs were very much engineered... the exact results they yield are hard to determine since they're large statistical models, but I don't think that categorizes the LLMs themselves as a 'discovery' (like say Penicilin)

[baq]

There’s an argument that all maths are discovered instead of invented or engineered. LLM hardware certainly is hard engineering but the numbers you put in it aren’t, once you have them; if you stumbled upon them by chance or they were revealed to you in your sleep it’d work just as well. (‘ollama run mixtral’ is good enough for a dream to me!)

[SkyMarshal]

If the Black Swan model of science is true, then most of the consequential innovations and advances are discovered rather than engineered.

[arketyp]

I understand your distinction, I think, but I would say it is more engineering than ever. It's like the early days of the steam engine or firearms development. It's not a hard science, not formal analysis, it's engineering: tinkering, testing, experimenting, iterating.

[peddling-brink]

> tinkering, testing, experimenting, iterating

But that describes science. http://imgur.com/1h3K2TT/

[amelius]

AI requires a lot of engineering. However, the engineering is not what makes working in AI interesting. It's the plumbing, basically.

[mejutoco]

I believe, from what I saw in Mathematics, this is a matter of taste. Discovered or invented are 2 perspectives. Some people prefer to think that light is reaching in previously dark corners of knowledge waiting to be discovered(discover). Others prefer to think that by force of genius they brought the thing into the world.

To me, personally, these are 2 sides of the coin, without one having more proof than the other.

[justanotheratom]

and finally, this justifies the "science" in Computer Science.