4 ms·

I keep hearing we don’t know “how llm’s work”, in mean yes we know the algorithms but the WHY I suppose. I’m not sure if that’s really true, does the best resea

I keep hearing we don’t know “how llm’s work”, in mean yes we know the algorithms but the WHY I suppose. I’m not sure if that’s really true, does the best researcher at OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini not know why it works? Would they say that? Anyway these discussions always make me think we are too generous to humans. I know very few humans who are good at reasoning. It’s surprisingly hard to just think really hard through a problem. We mostly intuit, act, repeat. It’s a rare thing for someone to deeply reason. The other problem I have with this is that we apply the word “reasoning” here because we haven’t really got another language for it, so we anthropomorphise the llm because that’s our reductive mental model and then complain that it’s not human enough.

svachalek 2mo ago
We've come a long way since the first LLMs were created. They originally produced a lot of surprises that were very hard to explain, it's true. But current research is very tightly directed at producing forward results; it's not just throw in more training data and make a bigger model and see what happens anymore (although there's still a bit of that too). The researchers have much more advanced understanding of how they work now, it just doesn't propagate out to the public which is still repeating "autocomplete on steroids" years later.