Back when GANs were popular, I'd train generator-discriminator models for image generation.
I thought a lot about it and realised discriminating is much easier than generating.
I can discriminate good vs bad UI for example, but I can't generate a good UI to save my life. I immediately know when a movie is good, but writing a decent short story is an arduous task.
I can determine the degree of realism in a painting, but I can't paint a simple bicycle to convince a single soul.
We can determine if an LLM generation is good or bad in a lot of cases. As a crude strategy then we can discard bad cases and keep generating till we achieve our task. LLMs are useful only because of this disparity between discrimination vs generation.
These two skills are separate. Generation skills are hard to acquire and very valuable. They will atrophy if you don't keep exercising those.
I think this is true for the very simple cases, for example and obviously bad picture vs. a good one.
I don't think this is necessarily true for more complex tasks, especially not in areas that require deep evaluation. For example, reviewing 5 non-trivial PRs is probably harder and more time consuming than writing it yourself.
The reason why it works well for images and short stories is because the filter you are applying is "I like it, vs. I don't like it", rather than "it's good vs. it's not good".
I thought a lot about it and realised discriminating is much easier than generating.
I can discriminate good vs bad UI for example, but I can't generate a good UI to save my life. I immediately know when a movie is good, but writing a decent short story is an arduous task.
I can determine the degree of realism in a painting, but I can't paint a simple bicycle to convince a single soul.
We can determine if an LLM generation is good or bad in a lot of cases. As a crude strategy then we can discard bad cases and keep generating till we achieve our task. LLMs are useful only because of this disparity between discrimination vs generation.
These two skills are separate. Generation skills are hard to acquire and very valuable. They will atrophy if you don't keep exercising those.