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by probablybetter 539 days ago
Please tell me what quantum leap was provided by LLMs. Please inform me of any developments that made current LLMs possible.

I contend that there are none. Witness the actual transformer kernel technologies over the last 20 years and try to find a single new one.

Neural Networks? that's 90's technology. Scale is the only new factor I can think of.

This is an investor-dollar driven attempt to use brute-force to deliver "magical" results when the fundamental technology is being mis-represented to the general public, to CTOs, and even to Developers.

This is dishonest and will not end well.

2 comments

The biggest capability jump comes from semantic search. You can now search based on the content of a text rather than a literal character level match.
I am slowly coming 'round to the same conclusion: Word2Vec might be as fundamental as fire - all due caveats aside, of course ...
Nailed it.