> If calculators returned even 99.9% correct answers, it would be impossible to reliably build even small buildings with them.

I think past successes have led to a category error in the thinking of a lot of people.

For example, the internet, and many constituent parts of the internet, are built on a base of fallible hardware.

But mitigated hardware errors, whether equipment failures, alpha particles, or other, are uncorrelated.

If you had three uncorrelated calculators that each worked 99.99% of the time, and you used them to check each other, you'd be fine.

But three seemingly uncorrelated LLMs? No fucking way.

There's another category error compounding this issue: People think that because past revolutions in technology eventually led to higher living standards after periods of disruption, this one will too. I think this one is the exception for the reasons enumerated by the parent's blog post.

The LLMs are not uncorrelated, though, they're all trained on the same dataset (the Internet) and subject to most of the same biases