Douglas Adams showed remarkable foresight in depicting his Deep Thought supercomputer, tasked with calculating the answer to the “ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.” Of course, this is an overly broad and underspecified task, forcing the AI to make assumptions.
In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (read it if you want to understand this cartoon), Deep Thought provides the answer “42” after several million years of calculation.
When working with AI, underspecifying the task is just one of the problems. Context window size is another, since the AI will begin to forget once the window is full—or even terminate the calculation entirely. A larger context window does not always help, though, because problem complexity does not scale linearly with context size. Having twice the window size does not mean you gain twice the problem-solving ability.
It is therefore important to keep problems small enough to be solvable by the AI and to specify them clearly.
Have fun—and contact us if you need consulting on these topics.
Rüdiger
