The reason we can’t capture it empirically is that nobody truly knows exactly what we are supposed to be using these tools for or how they are going to operate. We are still fitting squares into holes with them. We are told to treat them like some bespoke tool for coding, shopping, tech-support, etc. But it is not actually purpose built for any of these things.

When I use a calculator, I know exactly what it does and what it is supposed to do. It always gives me a verifiable, predictable result. If I input “8+8” 10,000x it will give me “16” 10,000x outside of incredibly fringe edge cases/bugs. I can’t say the same for LLMs