> Yes, LLMs are literally just matmul. How can anything useful, much less intelligent, emerge from multiplying numbers really fast? But then again, how can anything intelligent emerge from a wet mass of brain cells? After all, we're just meat. How can meat think?

LLMs actually hint at an answer to that, but most people seem to be focusing too much on matmuls or (on the other end) specific training inputs to pay attention to where the interesting things happen.

Training an LLM builds up a structure in high-dimensional space, and inference is a way to query the shape of that structure. That's literally the "quality of quantity", reified. This is what all those matmuls are doing.

How can anything useful, much less intelligent, emerge from a bunch of matmuls or wet mass of brain cells? That's the wrong level of abstraction. How can a general-purpose quasi-intelligence emerge from a stupidly high-dimensional latent space that embeds rich information about the world? That's the interesting question to ponder, and it starts with an important realization: it's not obvious why it couldn't.