4 ms·

Why do you say that?

• K0balt 3y ago
  Some people are having a hard time understanding that the knowledge embedded in language and culture includes much of the skills that we understand as reasoning and inference. The line of thought is that statistical predictions of language normality cannot possibly equal reasoning, but that ignores the capacity of a metascale n-dimensional matrix to encode much, much more than merely words and their statistical frequency of appearance. Much like a table of sines and cosines, computation itself can be encoded in data. LLMs allow us to extract this data.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • akomtu 3y ago
    And there are already priests of this metascale n-dimensional matrix cult. Their preachers are full of mathy words and sound very convincing to laymen.
    • K0balt 3y ago
      It’s not really complicated or mathy at all. If you want to understand how something really complex like an arbitrarily detailed simulation of the world, for example, can exist solely in data, just imagine an arbitrarily large and detailed 3d choose your own adventure book. And of course a huge body of human intellectual product is going to imbed a lot more than just the words themselves. To think otherwise is to imagine that there is no meaning in language except the words themselves. Insofar as reasoning can be accomplished in language, or ideas represented, they are encoded in the arrangement and sequence of the words. LLMs merely allow us to access this imbedded information in a convenient conversational format. No hand wavey magic needed.