this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Consider some human examples: sometimes people disagree with their doctor so they go see another doctor and another until they get the answer they want. Sometimes two very experienced lawyers both look at the facts and disagree.

This actually illustrates my point really well. Because the reason those people disagree might be

  1. Different awareness of the facts (lawyer A knows an important piece of information lawyer B doesn't)
  2. Different understanding of the facts (lawyer might have context lawyer B doesn't)
  3. Different interpretation of the facts (this is the hardest to quantify, as its a complex outcome of everything that makes us human, including personality traits such as our biases).

Whereas you can ask the same question to the same LLM equipped with the same data set and get two different answers because it's just rolling dice at the end of the day.

If I sit those two lawyers down at a bar, with no case on the line, no motivation other than just friendly discussion, they could debate the subject and likely eventually come to a consensus, because they are sentient beings capable of reason. That's what LLMs can only fake through smoke and mirrors.