[ this comment was written in response to a user who appears to have deleted their comment before I could finish putting my response together. I'm not sure why

[ this comment was written in response to a user who appears to have deleted their comment before I could finish putting my response together. I'm not sure why they deleted it, it seemed reasonable in the face of the ongoing discussion in this thread. I'm going to leave my response here, partly so they can see it if so interested, and mostly just because I already spent the time to write it :) ] I fail to see any distinction between your description of "mapping terms to latent spaces" and my assertion of GPT "working at a level of meaning and intent". I fail to see any distinction between "It's using complex non-linear transformations to map observed text to an extremely high-dimensional latent space, and in addition learning to both encode text to this representation and decode it from this representation back to the source language" and my assertion that "the literal meanings are abstracted and re-encoded". I feel like you're disagreeing with my stated positions because I am expressing them in a lay anthropomorphic language to express its functioning, but that we're otherwise agreeing? I had initially been responding to the user dvt, who said >LLMs work on tokens, which, for the most part, are words (longer words are generally split up into multiple tokens). Using concepts like "meaning" and "intent" muddies the waters unnecessarily. this seemed like an incorrect characterization of the process as I understood it. he doesn't acknowledge the existence of what you refer to as latent spaces, and seems fixated on GPT as merely moving around tokens (though I may be reading his position incorrectly, of course). I was arguing a claim of GPT's ability to represent concept distinct from literal meanings of terms, and for "understanding" how to transform these abstract meanings into different contexts. As far as I can tell, I don't really disagree with what you're saying at all.