LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction

I'm not sure why people struggle with the fact that an abstraction can be built on top of a non-deterministic and stochastic system. Many such abstractions already exist in the world we live.

Take sending a packet over a noisy, low SNR cell network. A high number of packets may be lost. This doesn't prevent me, as a software developer, from building an abstraction on top of a "mostly-reliable" TCP connection to deliver my website.

There are times when the service doesn't work, particularly when the packet loss rate is too high. I can still incorporate these failures into my mental model of the abstraction (e.g through TIMEOUTs, CONN_ERRs…).

Much of engineering and reliability history revolves around building mathematical models on top of an unpredictable world. We are far from solving this problem with LLMs, but this doesn't prevent me from thinking of LLMs as a new level of abstraction that can edit and transform code.

It's orthogonal to whether LLMs can be a useful abstraction layer, but ...

I have a feeling that if LLMs were built on a deterministic technology, a lot of the current AI-is-not-intelligent crowd would be saying "These LLMs can only generate one answer given a question, which means they lack human creativity and they'll never be intelligent!"

I don't agree with this take. Determinism is a nice property for abstractions to have, but it isn't necessary to be an abstraction.

And LLMs can handle very abstract concepts that could not possibly be encoded in C++, like the user's goal in using software.

LLMs are not inherently non-deterministic during inference. I don't believe non-determinism implies lack of abstraction. Abstraction is simply hiding detail to manage complexity.

You're right, but the reality is that the people who are excited about LLMs don't care about determinism. They are happy to hand off the thinking to a third party, even if it will give wrong answers they don't notice.

There are a few things being confused because people are having to learn/re-learn/re-discover basic computer science classes, but both formal specifications and informal specifications - such as pseudocode (I balk imagining how many AI users might not know this term), or natural language documentation - are all forms of abstraction. Programming languages and underlying models of computation all enable varying degrees of hiding details or emphasizing important ideas/information. Human thought and language, and mathematics, are already examples of abstraction in general. LLMs thus also purport to provide a (via computational model alternative to Turing machines) higher kind of abstraction, the debate is whether it is a good one, if its hallucinations make it unreliable, etc.

In other words, LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic.

This makes sense, but you need to understand that you're ignoring the compiler once you're past the machine code level which isn't an abstraction right, it's the root. So ignoring that part of the missive, goin from C to Python, different compilers do add different machine code.

C and Python have a bunch of different compilers, so you don't if you take the same code, the f' output can be different. There's determinism within the same compiler. Add in different architectures, and the machine code output definitely is more varied than presented.

But that's still a manageable; then what if you add in all the dependencies, well you get a more florid complexity.

So really, it's a shitty abstraction rather than an inaccurate analogy. If you lined them up in levels, there could be some universe where they are a valid abstraction. But it's not the current universe, because we know the models function on non-determinism.

I'd posit if there was a 'turtles all the way down' abstraction for the LLM, it's simply coming from the other end, the one where human mind might start entering the picture.

This is absurd. The author misrepresents the type of "abstraction" that people mean. This abstraction ladder goes as follows:

  - contributing individually
  - contributing as a tech lead
  - contributing as a technical manager
  - leaving the occupation to open a vanity business, such as a gastropub or horse shoeing service

LLMs are deterministic, the same model under the same conditions will produce the same output, unless some randomness is purposefully injected. Neural networks in general can be thought of as universal function approximators.