3 ms·
Because to the general public, LLMs are an example of Clarke's Third Law. Most folks, who are not remotely close to even a basic understanding of how LLMs opera
by garciasn 6d ago
Because to the general public, LLMs are an example of Clarke's Third Law. Most folks, who are not remotely close to even a basic understanding of how LLMs operate at a technical level and only view their output cannot possibly evaluate what they're experiencing other than to believe it's conscious, alive, and/or magic.
Most people on Earth try to put what they're seeing into the context of what they understand; mental gymnastics to try and understand what is happening based on their prior experience. They have absolutely 0 understanding of how it works under the hood so, to them, it must be alive.
- emp17344 6d agoAnd this apparently also applies to many HN users, many of whom should know better.
- garciasn 6d agoHN skews more technical, sure; but, that in no way means that they cannot be hoodwinked by behaviors that adhere to C3L.
- red75prime 6d ago> a basic understanding of how LLMs operate at a technical level An LLM with CoT is Turing-complete. Training is, basically, compression (the training data gets lossily compressed into the model's weights). The information-theoretic limit of compression is an algorithm that reproduces functionality of a system that produced the training data. No "magic" is required to get to a system that reproduces at least some facets of the human brain functionality. Three years ago I was skeptical that stochastic gradient descent (and other known techniques) are the way. But evidence kept piling up.
- emil-lp 5d ago> An LLM with CoT is Turing-complete. Given arbitrarily large context window.
- red75prime 5d agoSure. As is the case of every physical realization of the abstract Turing machine: there are some limitations.
- Marazan 5d agoAn LLM with CoT and hitherto undiscovered ability to avoid context poisoning/pollution would be more precise.