[fergal_reid]

Strongly agree.

This seems to be very hard for people to accept, per the other comments here.

Until recently I was willing to accept an argument that perhaps LLMs had mostly learned the patterns; e.g. to maybe believe 'well there aren't that many really different leetcode questions'.

But with recent models (eg sonnet-3.7-thinking) they are operating well on such large and novel chunks of code that the idea they've seen everything in the training set, or even, like, a close structural match, is becoming ridiculous.

[namaria]

All due respect to Simon but I would love to see some of that groundbreaking code that the LLMs are coming up with.

I am sure that the functionalities implemented are novel but do you really think the training data cannot possibly have had the patterns being used to deliver these features, really? How is it that in the past few months or years people suddenly found the opportunity and motivation to write code that cannot possibly be in any way shape or form represented by patterns in the diffs that have been pushed in the past 30 years?

[simonw]

When I said "the thing I am doing has never been done by anyone else before" I didn't necessarily mean groundbreaking pushes-the-edge-of-computer-science stuff - I meant more pedestrian things like "nobody has ever published Python code to condense and uncondense JSON using this new format I just invented today": https://github.com/simonw/condense-json

I'm not claiming LLMs can invent new computer science. I'm saying it's not accurate to say "they can only produce code that's almost identical to what's in their training data".

[namaria]

> "they can only produce code that's almost identical to what's in their training data"

Again, you're misinterpreting in a way that seems like you are reacting to the perception that someone attacked some of your core beliefs rather than considering what I am saying and conversing about that.

I never even used the words "exact same thing" or "almost identical". Not even synonyms. I just said overfitting and quoted from an OpenAI/Anthropic paper that said "predict plausible changes to code from examples of changes"

Think about that. Don't react, think. Why do you equate overfitting and plausibility prediction with "exact" and "identical". It very obviously is not what I said.

What I am getting at is that a cannon will kill the mosquito. But drawing a fly swatter in the cannonball and saying the plastic ones are obsolete now would be in bad faith. No need to say to someone pointing that out that they are claiming that the cannon can only fire on mosquitoes that have been swatted before.

[simonw]

I don't think I understood your point then. I matched it with the common "LLMs can only produce code that's similar to what they've seen before" argument.

Reading back, you said:

> I often see people wondering if the some coding task is performed well or not because of availability of code examples in the training data. It's way worse than that. It's overfitting to diffs it was trained on.

I'll be honest: I don't understand what you mean by "overfitting to diffs it was trained on" there.

Maybe I don't understand what "overfitting" means in this context?

(I'm afraid I didn't understand your cannon / fly swatter analogy either.)

[namaria]

It's overkill. The models do not capture knowledge about coding. They overfit to the dataset. When one distills data into a useful model the model can be used to predict future behavior of the system.

That is the premise of LLM-as-AI. By training these models on enough data, knowledge of the world is purported as having been captured, creating something useful that can be leveraged to process new input and get a prediction of the trajectory of the system in some phase space.

But this, I argue, is not the case. The models merely overfit to the training data. Hence the variable results perceived by people. When their intentions and prompt fit to the data in the training, the model appears to give good output. But the situation and prompt do not, the models do no "reason" about it and "infer" anything. It fails. It gives you gibberish or go in circles, or worse if there is some "agentic" arrangement if fails to terminate and burns tokens until you intervene.

It's overkill. And I am pointing out it is overkill. It's not a clever system for creating code for any given situation. It overfits to training data set. And your response is to claim that my argument is something else, not that it's overkill but that it can only kill dead things. I never said that. I see it's more than capable of spitting out useful code even if that exact same code is not in the training dataset. But it is just automating the process of going through google, docs and stack overflow and assembling something for you. You might be good at searching and lucky and it is just what you need. You might not be so used to using the right keywords or just be using some uncommon language, or in a domain that happens to not be well represented and then it feels less useful. But instead of just coming up short as search, the model overkills and wastes your time and god knows how much subsidized energy and compute. Lucky you if you're not burning tokens on some agentic monstosity.

[fergal_reid]

You are correct that variable results could be a symptom of a failure to generalise well beyond the training set.

Such failure could happen if the models were overfit, or for other reasons. I don't think 'overfit', which is pretty well defined, is exactly the word you mean to use here.

However, I respectfully disagree with your claim. I think they are generalising well beyond the training dataset (though not as far beyond as say a good programmer would - at least not yet). I further think they are learning semantically.

Can't prove it in a comment except to say that there's simply no way they'd be able to successfully manipulate such large pieces of code, using English language instructions, it they weren't great at generalisation and ok at understanding semantics.

[simonw]

If that's the case, it turns out that what I want is a system that's "overfitted to the dataset" on code, since I'm getting incredibly useful results for code out of it.

(I'm not personally interested in the whole AGI thing.)

[anon373839]

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to coax assistance out of LLMs when trying to design novel or custom neural network architectures. They are sometimes helpful with narrow aspects of this. But more often, they disregard key requirements in favor of the common patterns they were trained on.