[simonw]

I would expect most good LLMs to be able to implement statistical functions from scratch in languages like Go.

I often ask ChatGPT Code Interpreter to implement algorithm from scratch in Python where the library needed for that function isn't present in the Code Interpreter environment - things like haversine distances for example.

[skissane]

> I would expect most good LLMs to be able to implement statistical functions from scratch in languages like Go.

Implementing statistical functions from scratch can be rather dangerous – can you trust the implementation is correct? You can have an implementation which works well for a few obvious tests, but then performs poorly for edge cases (e.g. due to excessive accumulation of rounding error). Whereas, good chance the existing R implementation of whatever has been reviewed by expert statisticians.

LLMs can be great for saving time/energy when you have the domain expertise to validate their answers. But if you don't...

[simonw]

Yeah that's fair, I don't have a strong enough background in statistics to be able to catch edge cases in these kinds of things.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Implementing statistical functions from scratch can be rather dangerous – can you trust the implementation is correct? You can have an implementation which works well for a few obvious tests, but then performs poorly for edge cases (e.g. due to excessive accumulation of rounding error). Whereas, good chance the existing R implementation of whatever has been reviewed by expert statisticians.

What the GP said. This would scare the hell out of me, and I probably do have the expertise to check this.

More generally though, the LLM won't see the code for the implementations, just the function calls so I'd be really impressed if it could do a good job here.

[goatlover]

The statistical functions in R and Python libraries are well tested. I don't know what sort of confidence you'd have in an LLM generating new stats libraries in other languages.