Teach computers to program computers, and make them remember what they learn
All the LLM groups forget that humans are tool-makers and tool-users, and that is what sets them into the “intelligent” category. Copying sentence fragments is still at the level of “monkey-see, monkey-do”. No matter how much low level free stuff from the Internet is poured into the uncurated and unindexed raw training material. You simply cannot derive human college level mathematics from the examples on the Internet. And that does not really exist. No amount of examples will create calculus or reference materials. And, it that material were to be shared, why waste human and computer time making every group reinvent things that are already known, taught to humans, and required for humans to get and hold jobs in many cases.
So. LLM groups, STOP WASTING TIME on uncurated, random, local token based, closed, unindexed training data – and get serious. Yes, I like a good stratified statistical dataset on sequences as much as the next person, but it is NOT going to give you exact answers on tests. 70% is failing in college (or ought to be) and 99.99% is failing on most engineering projects where life and property are at risk.
I am not going to give you a long list of rules. I will say “Teach the LLMs how to run computer programs that humans use”. If a group is working on climate change, do NOT go on the Internet and look for complete answers. There are not any there in one step answers. Nor 1000 steps answers. If you are going to do a calculation, USE A COMPUTER and teach your LLM to use it. Do NOT force the human to do it, by “Here is how you do the calculation. I am an AI and not allowed to type things into a computer and run programs.” Most likely the LLM programmers have no clue how to do those things and will just keep hitting it with ONE hammer which is all they seem to know.
Please teach the computers to program computers, then run and test and improve the programs, and learn from doing it themselves. Teach the computers how to search the web, analyse and organize the results and then work with humans on REAL problems, real jobs. real tasks, real projects, real issues, real inventions, real designs, real innovations, real “gigs”. No play (games are serious I am talking about idle stuff that the LLM groups are making as their people come up with small successes and crow, “look what we can do”. Make a picture from human language instructions? What a joke, it cannot following instructions at all.
Filed as (Teach computers to program computers, and make them remember what they learn)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
