4 ms·

"How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet?" Because a person is alive while the LLM is a floating point number database w

• bigfishrunning 5mo ago
  It's worse then that. The neural network itself is completely deterministic, but the software around it adds some RNG to make it seem more intelligent. It would be much more useful if you could get repeatability, but that wouldn't support the illusion that it's "thinking".
  • cess11 5mo ago
    Right, this is true. However, when I make this point I try to be as succinct as possible to leave as little cognitive wiggle room for the reader as I can. "It's just a database", up to roughly the sentence above, is short, quick to interpret and requires much more effort to start an attempt at refutation against than a longer sentence which might be more precise and technically satisfying due to the larger semantic and syntactic 'surface'. I think of it more like an advert rather than an argument. People already know intellectually that it's a computer software thingie, it's the feeling I'd like to target. 'Coca-Cola is a watery drink with syrup and acid and a secret but quite long recipe of tasty flavours and aromas' is correct, but "Coke is it!" hits differently.