Remix.run Logo
photonthug 3 days ago

> And the sudden comparison to something that's safety critical is extremely dumb. Nobody said we should tie the LLM to a nuclear bomb that explodes if it makes a single mistake in chess.

But it actually is safety critical very quickly whenever you say something like “works fine most of the time, so our plan going forward is to dismiss any discussion of when it breaks and why”.

A bridge failure feels like the right order of magnitude for the error rate and effective misery that AI has already quietly caused with biased models where one in a million resumes or loan applications is thrown out. And a nuclear bomb would actually kill less people than a full on economic meltdown. But I’m sure no one is using LLMs in finance at all right?

It’s so arrogant and naive to ignore failure modes that we don’t even understand yet.. at least bridges and steel have specs. Software “engineering” was always a very suspect name for the discipline but whatever claim we had to it is worse than ever.