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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

Can't you just know that the earth is the center of the world by... like... just looking at how the world works?

Actually you'd trivially disprove that claim if you're starting from mechanistic knowledge of how orbits work, like how we have mechanistic knowledge of how LLMs work.

You have empirical observations, like replicating a fixed set of inner layers to make it think longer, or that you seem to have encode and decode layers. But exactly why those layers are the way they are, how they come together for emergent behaviour... Do we have mechanistic knowledge of that?

I think we've *only* got the mechanism, not the implications.

Compare with fluid dynamics; it's not hard to write down the Navier–Stokes equations, but there's a million dollars available to the first person who can prove or give a counter-example of the following statement:

  In three space dimensions and time, given an initial velocity field, there exists a vector velocity and a scalar pressure field, which are both smooth and globally defined, that solve the Navier–Stokes equations.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier–Stokes_existence_and_sm...

Though the above exchange felt a tiny bit snarky, I think the conversation did get more interesting as it went on. I genuinely think both people could probably gain by talking more -- or at least figuring out a way to move fast the surface level differences. Yes, humans designed LLMs. But this doesn't mean we understand their implications even at this (relatively simple) level.

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