I think this is basically right. You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic. LLM version is sneakier because skipping the work still produces something that looks finished.

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aykutseker 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A calculator gives you an answer. An LLM gives you an answer that sounds like it already checked itself.

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cryo32 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not quite. The LLM gives you a statistically probable sounding token stream. The calculator gives you a qualified answer within documented and deterministic limits of the device.

No one knows how to use either.

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charcircuit an hour ago | parent [-]

That is GPT-3. Modern models are rewarded based off the accuracy of their responses.

	▲	Aerolfos 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		By... another AI model. Which uses statistical generation to decide whether the answer is likely to be accurate or not.
	▲	simianparrot 22 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No they are not

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p-e-w 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic.

You do hand out driver’s licenses before people learned to ride a horse though, and you do hand out matches before people learned to make fire by hand. So this isn’t a universal pattern, and you shouldn’t expect it to hold true in the future.