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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't hold together. You seem to be arguing that LLMs produce text as a sequence of words. Which, fair enough, they obviously do.

But then your argument seems to drift into humans not producing text as a series of words. I'm not sure how you type your comments but you should upload a YouTube video of it as it sounds like it'd be quite a spectacle!

If your argument is that LLMs can't reason because they don't edit their comments, it'd be worth stopping and reflecting for a few moments about how weak a position that is. I wrote this comment linearly just to make a point with no editing except spellchecking.

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Humans don't really generate text as a series of words. If you've ever known what you wanted to say but not been able to remember the word you can see this in practice. Although the analogy is probably a helpful one, LLMs are basically doing the word remembering bit of language, without any of the thought behind it.

How do you generate your text? Do you write the middle of the sentence first, come back to the start then finish it? Or do you have a special keyboard where you drop sentences as fully formed input?

As systems humans and LLMs behave in observably similar ways. You feed in some sort of prompt+context, there is a little bit of thinking done, a response is developed by some wildly black-box method, and then a series of words are generated as output. The major difference is that the black boxes presumably work differently but since they are both black boxes that doesn't matter much for which will do a better job at root cause analysis.

People seem to go a bit crazy on this topic at the idea that complex systems can be built from primitives. Just because the LLM primitives are simple doesn't mean the overall model isn't capable of complex responses.

    Do you write the middle of the sentence first, come back to the start then finish it?

Am I the only one that does this?

I'll have a central point I want to make that I jot down and then come back and fill in the text around it -- both before and after.

When writing long form, I'll block out whole sections and build up an outline before starting to fill it in. This approach allows better distribution on "points of interest" (and was how I was taught to write in the 90's).

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