(I keep delivering this as a quip, here's a bit more) First order of business - is 'tool' going to have an interesting, distinguishing and thus illuminative meaning or be a mere platitudinous stand-in for "anything useful"? We'll save tool as "anyone/thing that can be exploited" for the AI titans, f
If you cut of your arm with a chainsaw then you have taken the actions to cut off your arm with the chainsaw.
An llm chainsaw could bend its blade 180° and cut off your arm without you even wanting it or taking any step in that direction.
If you hold the chainsaw and the llm chainsaw the exact same way, the normal chainsaw would not cut off your arm, no mather what (exept for a catastrophic failure wich can happen to both chainsaws). With the llm chainsaw you roll the dice every time and sometimes it just says “nah, tree too big. I’ll cut your arm instead because it is easier”.
That is the difference for me. One thing is completely dependant on your actions and if you do everything correctly than it should produce the outcome you expect.
With an llm you could do everything right and it does something you didn’t want without.
A tool should always do what you want and not have a built in randomness to the output.
So now I have a bag of dice. I use them to predict something and roll each of them 1000 times. I don’t want randomness in that case, I want statistics.
Its not that a tool has to be safe.
If you cut of your arm with a chainsaw then you have taken the actions to cut off your arm with the chainsaw.
An llm chainsaw could bend its blade 180° and cut off your arm without you even wanting it or taking any step in that direction.
If you hold the chainsaw and the llm chainsaw the exact same way, the normal chainsaw would not cut off your arm, no mather what (exept for a catastrophic failure wich can happen to both chainsaws). With the llm chainsaw you roll the dice every time and sometimes it just says “nah, tree too big. I’ll cut your arm instead because it is easier”.
That is the difference for me. One thing is completely dependant on your actions and if you do everything correctly than it should produce the outcome you expect. With an llm you could do everything right and it does something you didn’t want without.
A tool should always do what you want and not have a built in randomness to the output.
When you roll dice, you use a tool (the dice), and they’re random.
But with the dice you explicitly want the randomnes. With an llms you usually want something else.
You could technically use them for randomnes, but they are retty terrible at randomnes.
So now I have a bag of dice. I use them to predict something and roll each of them 1000 times. I don’t want randomness in that case, I want statistics.
One dice is a tool, but a bag of dice isn’t?