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> I quite agree and so would Wittgenstein

It depends on whether you ask him before or after he went camping -- but yeah, I was going for an early-Wittgenstein-esque "natural language makes it way too easy to say stuff that doesn't actually mean anything" (although my argument is much more limited).

> I think this is a fundamental problem with the "chat" style of interaction

The continuation of my argument would be that if the problem is effectively expressible in a formal language, then you likely have way better tools than LLMs to solve it. Tools that solve it every time, with perfect accuracy and near-optimal running time, and critically, tools that allow solutions to be composed arbitrarily.

Alpha Go and NNUE for computer chess, which are often cited for some reason as examples of this brave new science, would be completely worthless without "classical" tree search techniques straight out of the Russel-Norvig.

Hence my conclusion, contra what seems to be the popular opinion, is that these tools are potentially useful for some specific tasks, but make for very bad "universal" tools.




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