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by shafoshaf 300 days ago
They can mimic well documented behavior. Applying an LLM to a novel task is where the model breaks down. This obviously has huge implications for automation. For example, most business do not have unique ways of handling accounting transactions, yet each company has a litany of AR and AP specialists who create semmingly unique SOPs. LLMs can easily automate those workers since they are simply doing a slight variation at best of a very well documented system.

Asking an LLM to take all this knowledge and apply it to a new domain? That will take a whole new paradigm.
2 comments
quesera 300 days ago
Absolutely agreed, but I suspect that a whole lot of what humans do every day can be reduced to pattern-following.

If/when LLMs or other AIs can create novel work / discover new knowledge, they will be "genius" in the literal sense of the word.

More genius would be great! (probably) . But genius is not required for the vast majority of tasks.

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andrewla 300 days ago
> Applying an LLM to a novel task is where the model breaks down

I mean, don't most people break down in this case too? I think this needs to be more precise. What is the specific task that you think can reliably distinguish between an LLM's capability in this sense vs. what a human can typically manage?

That is, in the sense of [1], what is the result that we're looking to use to differentiate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913498

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