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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

A weather model is made to predict the weather and used to predict the weather, so there you are right.

A language model is made to predict language, but used to generate code or answers to math questions, that is not the same situation as a weather model. The language model is not made to solve math or generate correct code, if you ask it to predict the weather it wont try to predict the weather, it will just predict the language that is a probable to such a question.

This sort of misunderstanding is what is causing all these debates, many people really struggle understanding what these language models really are.

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That framing is too narrow. A weather model is trained on physics equations but still relies on patterns in past data to make forecasts. A language model is trained on patterns in human text but that text already encodes mathematics, code, and reasoning. When prompted with a math problem, the model is not doing physics but it is reproducing the learned statistical structure of solutions people have written before. The distinction between “predicting language” and “solving math” is smaller than it seems because the training data couples symbols to meaning. Dismissing its outputs as “just predicting words” misses the fact that word distributions encode information-rich representations of knowledge. That is why large models can in practice generate working code, prove theorems, and reason through problems, even if they do so imperfectly. The right comparison is not that people are misusing them, but that they generalize beyond their design intent because language itself is the medium through which so many other domains are expressed.

I agree the model is predicting language and not actually running the math. That is a point I try to stress too. It is not thinking through a problem, it is predicting what text would look like if someone were working it out.

But the training does not just reinforce plausible continuations, it biases toward text that matches correct answers. So in that sense they are training it not just to predict any likely text, but to predict text that is more likely to contain the right answer to a math or coding problem.

To me that does not look so different from other ML models. They all work by turning a problem into something a computer can handle statistically, and they all face the same trade offs. Prediction errors are inevitable, and you still have to decide whether to tune for recall, which gives hallucinations, or precision, which gives refusals.

> A language model is made to predict language

<pedantry>Isn't a language model made to predict the next token in a series, which just so happens to be good for predicting not only natural languages, but also formal ones (code and math)?</pedantry>

Also, similar to what nelox said, as long as language (or sequences of tokens or what have you) can be "about" something (whatever that means), then it's possible that LLMs are encoding information about that "something". I'm being deliberately vague because I think that trying to be precise (by e.g. referring to latent spaces and so on) makes it sound like we've figured something out when in reality we haven't even found the right words to ask the questions.

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