[foolswisdom]

This reminds of the conversation the other day about the deleted production database at railway. "this person obviously didn't follow best practice of being hyper distrusting of LLM agents", and the response "yeah but every company is marketing it as safe. someone is gonna fall for it".

[kryogen1c]

(Well-regulated) free markets are sort of built on the principle of educated consumerism. Your choice matters; its not up to the government to make illegal every non-optimal product. However, we do expect some minimum level of safety.

What does that mean for llms? Their nondeterminism does seem to incline them toward a legal safety requirement. Can you buy a fire extinguisher that 1/1000 times burns your house down? Or can your car brakes instead increase acceleration in rare cases?

Im using llms much more than i used to, but i still cant shake the fundamental stochastic nature of the technology.

[cheschire]

Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact. It's simple arithmetic. It's a story problem. If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall? You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall. If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club