I don’t understand what it means to be “solved”. It’s like saying that “architecture is now solved”, “physics is solved”, or “programming is solved”.
It’s a field of science and/or engineering, it’s not like we will ever run out of things to try/build/investigate. LLMs work… to a certain extent, with limitations and tradeoffs, and for some things. Would you spend days, money and Co2 to split a huge text corpus in sentences with a LLM, if a simpler program can do that just as well, there’s no need to find “the perfect prompt” (and hope that the LLM doesn’t forget one sentence, adds something inbetween, etc etc) and it gets done in three hours?
I take it to mean that there is an effective generally accepted solution or methodology for problems in the field. Bridge building has been largely solved by methods of mathematical and computational structural analysis, manufacturing, and government regulation. We know how to build a bridge. Before the solution was known, designers would just go by intuition and we wouldn’t have any actual assurance that the bridge would hold. We can probably never solve larger domains like physics, programming, or architecture.
But your bridge building analogy doesn't define what "solved" means still. When it comes to bridge building, "solved" means the bridge won't collapse under expected conditions. All you did was bring up an area where "solved" does have a definition, but that does nothing to define "solved" in the field we're discussing.
I think NLP is closer to architecture than to bridge building (and even there, I’m sure we’re still probably researching stuff to know more about how to calculate the stresses and whatnot)
It’s a field of science and/or engineering, it’s not like we will ever run out of things to try/build/investigate. LLMs work… to a certain extent, with limitations and tradeoffs, and for some things. Would you spend days, money and Co2 to split a huge text corpus in sentences with a LLM, if a simpler program can do that just as well, there’s no need to find “the perfect prompt” (and hope that the LLM doesn’t forget one sentence, adds something inbetween, etc etc) and it gets done in three hours?