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LLMs Bring New Nature of Abstraction

15 points3 daysmartinfowler.com
bwfan12328 minutes ago

Can authors of such articles at least cite Dijkstra's "On the foolishness of "natural language programming"." which appeared eons ago ? Which presents an argument against the "english is a programming language" hype.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

ptx2 hours ago

> As we learn to use LLMs in our work, we have to figure out how to live with this non-determinism [...] but there will also things we'll gain that few of us understand yet.

No thanks. Let's not give up determinism for vague promises of benefits "few of us understand yet".

aradox661 hour ago

Determinism isn't always ideal. Determinism may trade off with things like accuracy, performance, etc. There are situations where the tradeoff is well worth it.

pixl971 hour ago

Yep, there are plenty of things that aren't computable without burning all the entropy in the visible universe, yet if you exchange it with a heuristic you can get a good enough answer in polynomial time.

Weather forecasts are a good example of this.

aradox661 hour ago

Also, at temperature 0 LLMs can behave deterministically! Indeterminism isn't necessarily quite the right word for the kind of abstraction LLMs provide

sgt1011 hour ago

LLMs are deterministic.

If you run an LLM with optimization turned on on a NVIDIA GPU then you can get non-deterministic results.

But, this is a choice.

dingnuts2 hours ago

If LLMs are the new compilers, enabling software to be built with natural language, why can't LLMs just generate bytecode directly? Why generate HLL code at all?

Uehreka2 hours ago

Why would the ability to generate source code imply the ability to generate bytecode? Also you wouldn’t want that, humans can’t review bytecode. I think you may be taking the metaphor too literally.

pixl9758 minutes ago

I dont think they are... LLMs can learn from anything thats been tokenized. Feed enough decompiled and labeled data with the bytecode and it's likely the machine will be able to dump out an executable. I wouldn't be surprised if an llm could output a valid elf right now other than the tokens may have been stripped in pretraining.

VinLucero1 hour ago

I agree here. English (human language) to Bytecode is the future.

With reverse translation as needed.

thfuran50 minutes ago

English is a pretty terrible language for describing the precise behavior of a program.