Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…But you were just pointing out how we’ve actually gotten much better at agents writing not just functional code, but clean code. Why is it not the case that the same progress that lets you go from merely functional to a clean and mergeable PR also results in clearer writing? That’s a good point. Also, has it not? I agree there are many ways in which they’re terrible writers. But for a lot of writing I consume, I find it’s better to just copy-paste it into an LLM and say, “Explain this to me.” The explanation will be better than the thing produced by the human. It’s funny that we say these are such terrible writers, and yet my revealed preference is to have an LLM explain it. Even when I’m talking to a human expert live on a call, if it’s a piece of knowledge that only they have that’s not encoded in the distribution, I want them to explain it to me. But if in order to understand that, I need to understand a more basic concept, I would prefer if it were socially acceptable for me to just say, “Let’s pause here. I’m just going to ask an LLM how that works, and then we can come back to your special piece of knowledge.” That’s distillation, an explanation. If I’m thinking of your quality as an essay writer—if I give you a book to read and I want a book report—I might believe that the LLM gives me a better book report. But what people are really getting at when they say it’s bad is, what is writing? It’s not just the distillation of preexisting ideas. It’s not just how you explain clearly, because they are good explainers. It’s about what the insight is. This is where autoregression is a very weird way to generate things. When you’re writing, you sort of know that in order for it to be good, you have to have an element of the unpredictable. It’s not just increasing the temperature in your mind. It’s knowing exactly the correct point when you want to make an unpredictable move, and that that’s going to be what’s more insightful. Even if it’s better at explaining a preexisting thing, what generated that book that you wanted distilled in the first place? It wasn’t an LLM that generated it and you just needed it. It was some author who, through a lot of exploration of ideas in the world, decided what aspects were interesting and what ways of presenting it formed a coherent, well-motivated narrative. They put that all together in some way. If they’re a good author, you would probably err on the side of reading their book instead of the distillation. Still, what makes it worthwhile to explore at all in the first place and want to upload it at all? It’s that side of it that people cite when they say LLMs are bad at writing. It’s that element of unpredictability, of deliberately choosing something novel that is very directly contradictory to the way things are typically produced.…

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