Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea (rumple.github.io)
17 points by jimauthors a day ago
hexapus 27 minutes ago
I think it's good to continually remind oneself that these are next-word/token-predictors...you can wrap them up in a harness, you can feed them into each other, you can influence the likelyhood of a given word through weights and system prompts...but that's literally all they can do. They can't reason, but they can predict what reasoning looks like.
None of this means they can't be useful tools, but when they fall down, we should remind ourselves of why that is, and be honest with ourselves about what they could ultimately be capable of.
greenflag 23 minutes ago
What is the difference between reasoning and predicting what reasoning would look like?
phyzome 14 minutes ago
The same as the difference between a thing and a statistical model of a thing.
They don't always match up.
4b11b4 13 minutes ago
Yeah, using them for any (most) subjective task is generally incorrect
jongjong 5 minutes ago
LLMs are bad for rating or scoring anything because they have the sensibilities of the average person... And unfortunately, the average person has poor taste.
This is a tough one to explain because some people think the average person has good taste by definition. I used to think that way but over the years I've realized that a lot of what the average person likes is derivative 'slop' - This was true before AI and still true with AI.
Once you start deducting points for lack of originality, you will realize that people have really poor taste... Very narrow taste. Most people literally consume trashy variations of the same thing over and over. We have to start deducting points for this because the more intelligent among us can't take it anymore! We're tired of being exposed to thousands of variants of the same slop... It might be sufficiently different to fool the average pleb's simple mind but to us it's like eating the exact same dish every day with different amounts of salt and pepper.
This really comes through when you ask an LLM to rate something. It's frustratingly conventional and not based on first principles thinking.