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This would be a fine nonfiction piece if they hadn’t grafted their thinly-veiled opinion about LLMs into the middle of it in such an off-putting, awkward way. I guess that was the reason why they wrote the folksy nonfiction bits in the first place, though.

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It was an offhand 20 words out of a 5000 word article and a very pertinent example. I guess the question is, why were you not bothered by the negative opinion about instant coffee or particleboard or malls or Tinder or McNuggets, but hearing anything negative about LLMs is worth singling out to complain about?

The article boils down (pun intended) to, “you already accept all these things which I am glossing as basically instant mashed potatoes, so you should also accept LLMs.”

That’s why they not-so-subtly start calling them IMPs when they introduce the “abstracted version.”

It’s not merely an example. It’s the thesis of the article.

EDIT: Out of perversity, I skimmed the comments. The audience of Astral Codex Ten seems to share this interpretation, for whatever that’s worth.

I read the post as pretty clearly anti-LLM (and anti-instant-mashed-potatoes).

I found it funny (and annoying) that the article used an obvious LLM slopism immediately before that bit. It made me wonder how much of it was itself instant reconstituted wordslop.

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