Hacker News Reader

Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

Human expert relies in the “chunking” effect for expertise, which is mostly not part of the context length (working memory). For a pseudo-analogy, each human is fine-tuned from the raw intelligence (by training and education). In that way generic LLM probably can’t beat us yet so don’t despair!

View on HN

Any job focused on fact retrieval is at risk.

Need to know that the facts exist in the first place, though.

GPT-4 is already at a level that it has graduate level math and physics knowledge, with a level of recall that most students can only dream of.

Do those actually matter in jobs? Most valuable facts I encounter are far more niche, often in someone's head and not written down, only stored privately somewhere etc.

What kind of job is only focused on fact retrieval?

Jeopardy contestant

My bigget blocker in web development is fact retrieval. As someone who only dabbles, I don't struggle with how to logically design my project, but I'm constantly forgetting CSS and JS details like how to accomplish a specific task with CSS flexbox or how to sort an array in JS vs in Python. On old personal projects, I forget the names of my own functions and whether they return a list or a dict. Hell, I'll forget function signatures for functions I just wrote. I forget external library and API details. If I had perfect recall, I would 100x my web dev productivity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com