alt Hacker NewsI don't feel that this piece explains its title very well (to me) though the idea expressed by the title is spot-on
I've gone through hand-coding HTML, CGI, CMSes, web frameworks, and CMSes built with web frameworks. Each is (roughly) a layer of abstraction on top of lower layers.
People talk about LLMs as an extension of this layering but they're not. With the layers of abstraction I've listed you can go down to the layers underneath and understand them if you take the time.
LLMs are something different. They're a replacement for or a simulation of the thinking process involved in programming at various layers.
Replies
DauntingPear7 • today at 4:19 AM
theyre like an advanced form of program synthesis. Something that operates outside of the abstraction layering.
Your point is similar to the post in a sense that all abstractions are deterministic, so you could go connect the higher layer directly to the lower layer, while in LLMs, by their very probabilistic/black box nature you can’t have this direct link.
But isn’t this just a semantics discussion? Is there a rule for abstraction in CS that says it needs to be deterministic (I really don’t know)?
I believe deterministic abstraction to natural language is impossible to reach by the very ambiguous nature of it, we get misunderstandings when we talk to each other so naturally when talking to a machine it would need to be probabilistic to understand how to translate it to code.