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by pbw 300 days ago
Essentially, Jenson's complaint is "When I ask an LLM to 'summarize' it interprets that differently from how I think of the word 'summarize' and I shouldn't have to give it more than a one-word prompt because it should infer what I'm asking for."
2 comments

I think exactly this. When someone is given the task of writing a book review for the New Yorker there is a (probably unstated) agreement that they won't simply summarize the contents, but weave it into an essay in the way the LLM proposed. You could definitely get a similar result from an LLM by giving a more suitable and verbose prompt such as "review these 3 titles together, talk about their shared themes and concepts in a way that is relevant to the contemporary audience" etc etc.
Specifically, Jenson's complaint is that the LLM knows what the word "summarize" means, instead of misunderstanding in the same way Jenson does.