> In the same way high-level languages are a layer on top of writing machine code manually.

Another layer, yes, but NOT "in the same way." It is a new, different kind of layer. The other layers were deterministic, not probabilistic.

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schnebbau an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I meant that no-one writes assembly anymore. I wasn't around when that transition happened, but I bet there were the same "this high-level language is compiling to inefficient code, it's useless" comments.

	▲	unknownfuture 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. They know what you meant. You missed the point of their response. A compiler is semantically deterministic. It has a spec. Give it an input and you can know exactly what the output will do. And if there's edge cases where behaviour is undefined, thats also well known apriori. (And yes, to get ahead of the nitpickers, I know the specific sequence of bytes the compiler will emit can vary (hence the difficulty of reproducible builds), hence why I said "semantically"). LLMs do not share this property. At all. I mean not even close They are a completely new and different class of tool. They are not just a step up the abstraction layer. They're not compilers for English. To call them that is to fundamentally not grok what a compiler is or does. That doesn't make them bad. It just makes that analogy, and any conclusions you might draw from it, bad.

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baq an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Probabilistic algorithms are not new. If the distribution is known you can bend surprisingly many things to your will in the long run - and the most interesting part is the long run can be unexpectedly short.

LLMs are quite interesting in that regard because you have a lot of levers to influence the shape of the distribution; the ways are different for each model, so it’s a very experimental science, but applying the scientific method is exactly how you get good results.