Depending on how you combine imperfect systems, you can lower or increase error rates.

Well, in principle yes one system can compensate for another, in practice, errors tend to compound and combine in interesting ways, not go away, particularly in systems like this which are unpredictable and generate slightly different responses each time without human intervention. They are not reliable in the way we're used to considering and don't work well without supervision from careful humans at present.

I don't think there really is a clear distinction between these things though.

Yes your second point is an interesting one - the divisions between these things are arbitrarily imposed on the world, but we do have these distinctions for a reason, even if they are not completely objective.

I do think this is a significant problem specific to LLMs though (that I at least see when using them) - we don't have a way to constrain them in what knowledge they consider. This can be a bonus (they are good at connecting faraway bits of maths in interesting ways), but it can be a significant problem when asking for a summary of a data - confabulations and data from outside the context easily leak into the output of the LLM. That is undesirable behaviour and we have no reliable way to constrain it.

I'm not sure that this particular effort is going to help because it doesn't change or constrain the behaviour of the actual machines and the behaviour is the problem, not the data they are fed.

> Well, in principle yes one system can compensate for another, in practice, errors tend to compound and combine in interesting ways, not go away, particularly in systems like this which are unpredictable and generate slightly different responses each time without human intervention.

Ah but the point here IIUC is moving from "let an LLM figure out the right way of querying the data and what you mean with your terms from a wide span of different documents and sources, which it has to perform multiple searches on" to "let an LLM figure out the right way of querying your data with a coherent and machine readable ontology".

While the conversion from "load of data" to "defined structure" is error prone, you now have the second step operating on the same converted thing, and you have ways of fixing that over time (the corrections).

By splitting the task into two distinct phases, you can both interpret and fix the middle step, and remove a large class of mistakes and/or differences caused by different interpretations of the same documents.

There are really two answers to it IMO that this boils down to:

1. This process may be less error prone for that first step than the LLM you're using. That could reduce errors. 2. This process means the first step is run once rather than every time which means you cut out one area where there can be differences each time.

> Yes your second point is an interesting one - the divisions between these things are arbitrarily imposed on the world, but we do have these distinctions for a reason, even if they are not completely objective.

You're right, I think there are useful groupings, but I think any effort to fully isolate them is doomed to fail because they inherently blend. Your instructions contain things that can only be understood in context of world knowledge and the data. The data only makes sense with certain bits of world knowledge.

We also know that these things happen with humans (again just to pre-empt how others may read this and not saying you are accusing me of this, I'm not gotcha-ing here) and so we often have to be careful about how we ask questions, how different cultural backgrounds impact understanding and so forth. We have to take care about how we structure things.

> I'm not sure that this particular effort is going to help because it doesn't change or constrain the behaviour of the actual machines and the behaviour is the problem, not the data they are fed.

I think this effort does address that. A really key thing is that this is about turning human readable questions into SQL that then only query the actual data and you see the result of that query - it allows you to constrain things more (at both points).