[jives]

I wonder if it's trying to predict what kind of estimate a human engineer would provide.

[EGreg]

Considering it’s trained on predicting the next word in stuff humans estimated before AI, wouldn’t that make sense?

[kridsdale1]

A HUGE amount of the workday artifacts engineers have been forced to produce since we started the internet is project estimation documents for our managers. The training corpus on this stuff is immense and now all ingested in to these models. It’s doing no thinking at all when it gives you an estimate, it’s matching correlated strings which the humans of the past had to write down.

Fun fact, all those human-sourced estimates were hallucinations too.