> I don't know exactly where that point is, but it's certainly not when the toaster is making zero decisions.

Where the "decision making" happens gets fuzzy, but that's true in the toaster too.

Your run of the mill toaster is a heating element and a timer. Is the timer a rudimentary decision process?

A more modern toaster is going to include a thermocouple or thermister to ensure that the heating elements don't light things on fire. This requires a logic circuit. Is this a decision process? (It is entirely deterministic)

A more advanced one is going to incorporate a PID controller, just like your oven. It is deterministic in the sense that it will create the same outputs given the same inputs but it is working with non-deterministic inputs.

These PIDs can also look a lot like small neural networks, and in some cases they are implemented that way. These processes need not be deterministic. You can even approach this problem through RL style optimizations. There's a lot of solutions here.

When you break this down, I agree, it is hard to define that line, especially as we break it down. But that's part of what I'm after with robotresearcher. The claim was about task performance but then the answer with a toaster was that the human and toaster work together. I believe dullcrisp used the toaster as an example because it is a much simpler problem than playing a game of chess (or at least it appears that way).

So the question still stands, when does the toaster make the toast and when am I no longer doing so?

When is the measurement attributed to the toaster's ability to make toast vs mine?

Now replace toasting with chess, programming, music generation, or anything else that we have far less well defined metrics for. Sure, we don't have a perfect definition of what constitutes toast, but it is definitely far more bound than these other things. We have accuracy in the definition, and I'd argue even fairly good precision. There's high agreement on what we'd call toast, not toasted bread, and burnt bread. We can at least address the important part of this question without infinite precision in how to discriminate these classifications.

That doesn't resolve the question.

  > Not sure where you imagine my inconsistency is.

  >> Let's take a step back. At what point is it me making the toast and not the toaster? Is it because I have to press the level? We can automate that. Is it because I have to put by bread in? We can automate that. Is it because I have to have the desire to have toast and initiate the chain of events? How do you measure that?

Maybe I've (and others?) misunderstood your claim from the get-go? You seem to have implied that LLMs understand chess, physics, programming, etc because of their performance. Yet now it seems your claim is that the LLM and I are doing those things together. If your claim is that a LLM understands programming the same way a toaster understands how to make toast, then we probably aren't disagreeing.

But if your claim is that a LLM understands programming because it can produce programs that yield a correct output to test cases, then what's the difference from the toaster? I put the prompts in and pushed the button to make it toast.

I'm not sure why you imagine the inconsistency is so difficult to see.

Just like a toaster with the lever jammed down, yes!

I mean, that was the question I was asking... If it wasn't clear, my answer is no.

It’s only responsible for the toasting part. The bread machine makes the bread.

How do you get bread? Don't tell me you got it at the market. That's just paying someone else to get it for you.