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   Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 08:25:30 JST Charlie Stross

   An important thought that seems to elude the AI galaxy brains like billg who want to replace professionals with LLMs is: how are new phenomena identified and dealt with, given that LLMs are trained only on PRE-EXISTING data?

   For example: how would a hypothetical LLM physician have identified a case of COVID19 back in February 2020? (Hint: it'd have diagnosed it as something else—wrongly—every time! Because not in the training data.)

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@snac.lx.oliva.nom.br)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 10:28:09 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     firm nod! our neural pathways cross again 🙂 kudos, you've got a greatly illustrative example there!
     https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/2023-08-20-stochastic-parrots-vs-intelligence.en.html
     
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     Andrew Plotkin (zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 29-Mar-2025 10:31:54 JST Andrew Plotkin

     in reply to

     @cstross That also means back-pressure on the tech industry, where "new phenomena" are people inventing things rather than observational science.

     It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine.

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