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I don't want to read what you didn't write

1070 points · 460 comments · mooreds

  1. hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
    As I have been saying for years:

    Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.

    1. whycome · · focus · HN ↗
      What already happens: - People give an LLM a bulleted list of points that they want expanded into a professional sounding document. - The receiver doesn't wanna read all that. They put the full document into an LLM and ask it to summarize it into succinct bullet points.
      1. steveBK123 · · focus · HN ↗
        We've invented the opposite of lossless compression
        1. copperx · · focus · HN ↗
          A broken telephone.
          1. steveBK123 · · focus · HN ↗
            TAM: $50T
        2. intrasight · · focus · HN ↗
          It's been a huge boon to hardware vendors.
        3. erwincoumans · · focus · HN ↗
          Lossy expansion or bloat?
          1. steveBK123 · · focus · HN ↗
            Depends on if you are buying tokens or being paid for tokens
        4. lolakutty · · focus · HN ↗
          Students where doing that for the ages when they have to answer questions like. "Answer the following question in not less than 4 pages"...
          1. account42 · · focus · HN ↗
            In that case it's supposed show that the student can write four pages and not just about transferring information.
        5. KineticLensman · · focus · HN ↗
          Seven bullet points squeezed into five pages of text
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