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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

That was a lot of information compressed into a single sentence, but I think you hit the nail on its head. Most things I read about ChatGPT makes me think that most people don't understand what an LLM really is though and make assumptions on what it can do and what it 'understands'.

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That's because people look at what it can do rather than what it really is. Maybe what it really is doesn't really matter all that much except to 'AI purists'. But to the rest of the world if a company markets something as 'AI' they will treat it as such, including calibration of their response to the effects of that technology independent of how it works under the hood. Whether your job gets obsoleted by LLM or AGI doesn't really matter to people who couldn't tell the difference between the two and it shouldn't matter to them. Their voice deserves to be heard in this whole debate but the tech world has decided they don't really matter.

It’s worse: they look at what they anthropomorphically think it’s doing. Like looking at an animal picture classifier work and thinking it can see animals, or a watching a self-driving car and thinking it has some kind of simulation of a human driver in it.

I think the “AI purists” need to make a lot more noise about the fact that nobody knows what LLMs are doing.

There's a term for this anthropomorphic error in the neurosciences/psychology - a homonculus. Like your theory implies there's a little man in there doing the work. (homonculus also has other meanings in neuro, including cortical mappings, just sayin)

When I was doing my master's thesis, my industrial supervisor opined that a neural network "is really just a glorified lookup table". I think, given the succinctness of the characterisation, it's not too far off the mark.

Yeah this is a great description.

People are saying it's a "lossy jpeg" in a way that is disparaging and minimises how awesome LLMs actually are! They are a form of text compression that leverages the semantics of the text! Amazing!

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