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I think this is an uncharitable reading of this thread.

I’m arguing against the breathless use of “surprising”.

My gp explains what I think you overlooked in this dismissive response.

> to analyze its decisions computationally necessitates similar levels of computation for each decision being made as what was used to compute the weights.

Explainable but intractable is still far from surprising for me.

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> It's surprising because it wasn't the intent of LLMs. LLMs are just predictive models that guess the most likely next word. Having the results make sense was never a priority.

If you read through what Hinton or any of his famous students have said, it genuinely was and is surprising. Everything from AlexNet to the jump between GPT-2 to GPT-3 was surprising. We can't actually explain that jump in a formal way, just reasonable guesses. If something is unexplainable, it's unpredictable. Prediction without understanding is a vague guess and the results will come as a surprise.

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