Practical use of LLMs

Posted Aug 9, 2025 10:32 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Practical use of LLMs by khim
Parent article: On the use of LLM assistants for kernel development

> That's not imitation of human brain, though. That's imitation of insect brain or, maybe, a chimps brain (although a chimps have world model even if they are less complicated than humans world model). It's pure reaction with nothing to control the “train of though” and to stop it from derailing.

It's not an imitation of ANY brain. Think about it. The brain has a lot of dedicated hardware, be it visual recognition, auditory recognition, whatever. And a small veneer of general purpose hardware over the top. AI runs on pure general purpose hardware.

And has been pointed out, a lot of the brain's special-purpose hardware is survival-ware - if the hardware gets it wrong, it's likely to end up as a lion's lunch, or whatever ...

Cheers,
Wol

Practical use of LLMs

Posted Aug 9, 2025 10:40 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> The brain has a lot of dedicated hardware, be it visual recognition, auditory recognition, whatever.

Isn't that GPT-5 “tools” and voice recognition in Gemini Live is for?

> AI runs on pure general purpose hardware.

Not really. It can be run, in theory, on general purpose hardware, but it's not clear if GPT-5 run on general purpose hardware would be at all practical.

Even if you just think about BF16… it's pretty specialized thingie.

> And has been pointed out, a lot of the brain's special-purpose hardware is survival-ware - if the hardware gets it wrong, it's likely to end up as a lion's lunch, or whatever ...

Sure, but do we actually use that hardware where we are writing code? Somehow I doubt it. It's like arguing that LLM couldn't write good code because it doesn't have liver… sure, liver is very important for human, but lack of liver is not what stops LLM from being good software designer.