True, but as far as that goes the question was a pointless one. Whereas the one that was answered has the potential to lead to productive conversation.

Depends on the implied meaning. What technical reason? There isn't one, obviously. But what about the practical reason for the behavior we observe? That's explained by the name and marketing. And if your goal is to understand "why are people doing this" then indeed marketing is what's important and software trust only barely enters into it.

Of course the irony there is palpable. Worry about the glasses while disregarding everything else.

The vector that needs to be checked is length n while computing that vector requires n^2 operations. I haven't benchmarked it but I expect the performance overhead to be a rounding error.

Agreed except for that last bit. Even if the session drags on endlessly the AI keeps using the same repetitive speech patterns (at least IME). Not only that but they stand out to me in that they don't match the nature of the conversation. It's a bit like receiving highly polished sales copy in response to an offhand forum post.

But importantly for dice we do understand the overarching principles that give rise to this. And dice don't output coherent sentences. Meanwhile in LLM land the analogous "roll of the dice" can result in a coherent response in natural language.

If you use a loaded dice, you can be pretty confident about where it will lands. It may not be 100% accurate, but can be quite close to certain. Without training the weight are pure noises. After training, it leans towards coherent sentences and particular statements.

Yes, and I believe my point still stands. We thoroughly understand the principle by which a loaded die can be intentionally biased despite not being able to predict the outcome of any given throw due to the system in question being a chaotic one.

In contrast, we do not understand LLMs in the same way (nor biological brains). Claiming that anything of that nature is simply biased towards coherent output seems entirely reductive to me - the question is how such coherence arises in the first place. There is no meaning encoded or computation performed by the particular pathway a die travels through the chaotic landscape.

Sure an argument can be made that it's "just" a next token predictor thus how is it really any different from a markov model? Yet the output is not even remotely the same.

> In contrast, we do not understand LLMs in the same way

From my point of view, (not a ML researcher), it’s due to the magic of numbers. The same thing happens with computer vision and neural networks. There’s a bunch of magic weights that get created which has no meaning by themselves, but computing them does help with detecting objects.

So if you take words, derives them into tokens, use the attention techniques to extract the “coherency” aspect, it’s no wonder you can replicate “coherency”. Add reinforcement learning to that to increase towards certain aspects like correct code syntax and you have heavily loaded the dice again.

We have used maths to model chemistry, biology, and physics, as well as economics and sociologic phenomena. Then we use maths (more specifically logic and set theory) to usher in the age of information and computing. Now you want us to act surprised that maths, through ML, can model language.

Maybe further down the line, we can have a simpler set of formulas for language coherency, but for now we have to make to with using the whole internet and a bazillion watts of power to guess the weights for the generic ML model.

I'm comparing it with chess. Chess is pretty complex, complex enough that only a small subset of humans can play it at a very high level. Introducing computers to chess first led to a statistical and brute force approach. But once that had paid off and the results were in people spent a lot of time analyzing those results and this led to an entirely new class of engine that was far more efficient than what had gone before and which performed even better than the 'big iron'.

I would not be surprised at all if we will find that AI will go the same route. The fact that we don't know how it works is where the opportunity for improvement lies.

Me: I don't expect to be stabbed.

You: But you only might be stabbed. It isn't required to happen only permitted.

A bad but conforming implementation of the standard can screw you over on every line of your program.

No, they didn't. UB is a cop out and inserting yield is just plain bad. Locking up one or more threads in an implementation defined manner would be the outcome of least surprise (I already know it's going to lock up at least the one thread).

The standards intended interpretation of UB was always intended to be something like "implementation defined, no documentation required" to allow for implementation weirdness, even unpredictable ones. It was compiler authors who decided do abuse this allowance to do really unintuitive things instead of weird platform weirdness.

100% There are implementations that have sane behavior for "UB" instead of making it an excuse to misbehave.

The ISO standard is not the same as a language from a single vendor.

IIRC a lot of it was benchmark gaming between GCC and LLVM.

Because one can bleeping see that that's what would happen. Locking up a thread isn't a good thing, but it's a lot better than UB. There was never a need to make this UB.

Yes, it was a horrible situation that has been replaced by an only slightly less horrible situation.

I don't totally agree with this. To me, UB is an order of magnitude worse than pretty much anything else, so this is more than "slightly less" horrible. I don't necessarily disagree that this is still horrible, but I also don't write an C++, so I'm mostly just commenting as an outside observer.

In other words, it's a sane default that you can opt out of on a case by case basis which is the way it should have been all along.

It's only an incentive to start caring if it's cheaper than circumventing the law. In other words it won't work unless the aforementioned liability loophole is closed.

To rephrase the comment you replied to, if being a cowboy is more profitable (by whatever shady means) then that will generally be preferred by the market. Despite whatever sensibilities you or I might have there is no escaping that simple truth of capitalism.