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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32894 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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life extension, replacing workers, treating disease

But all of these problems are reducible to text generation. In some sense every conceivable problem is, because solving the problem means writing out the solution, in language.

For “solving” medicine, just have the LLM print a formula for the drug you want. A lot of remote work just is text generation in a sense, but for physical labor, a sufficiently intelligent LLM would be able to accelerate progress in robotics significantly.

Whether LLMs can actually achieve these things though is an open question.

In some sense every conceivable problem is, because solving the problem means writing out the solution, in language.

Too bad LLMs also only have access to solutions that were also previously written out, in languatge.

I mean, they are capable of "solving" novel problems not in their initial data. The problems just have to have the same "shape" as problems already in their training data.

And certain kinds of "language" type problems can be solved purely on the basis of the LLM's "knowledge" of English. Those problems aren't necessarily super hard for a human to do, but could save time on tasks like that.

Kinda sorta I guess?

For the examples given, if you ask an LLM to "print a formula for a drug you want", it will print something that looks like a formula for drugs that it's seen -- not super useful, other than by 'infinite monkeys' means?

Not sure what he's getting at on robotics, but the 'talking about awesome robots' role does not seem to have any shortage of applicants. To be frank, it's bullshit other than for people with bullshit jobs who feel they should continue to be paid but not have to sully themselves by personally generating the bullshit.

(the PR people at my work are super interested in LLMs, for example -- like, your life is not meaningless enough banging out 500 word communiques, you need a machine to do that for you? I really don't know what else to say)

The big problem with medicine has always been testing. Human trials will always be expensive and time consuming

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