Hacker News Reader

Comment by daishi55 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the person you replied to was saying anything about what if anything is the subjective experience of being an LLM.

They were simply illustrating how the terms used to describe LLMs to make them sound simple and mechanical can equally be applied to humans.

View on HN

But then what's at stake here either way? If it's not meant to speak to the propriety or not of anthropomorphizing the LLM, what are we actually trying to police here?

I’m not policing anything. I’m claiming that if you truly in your heart believe that frontier LLMs are roughly as sophisticated and impressive as “autocomplete”, then your mental model of reality needs some serious readjustment.

I don't think anyone is using "autocomplete" in the way your phone does it. But it is shorthand for a much more sophisticated version that is built in similar ideas. And autoregressive models certainly have that in their core structure. But people are lazy and neither want to say a lot when few words work nor will they read long comments, even if more accurate

I want to clarify, most people are using "autocomplete" specifically to differentiate from how we humans operate. Sure, there is an autocomplete aspect, but it's not the core nor anywhere near the full story.

> Sure, there is an autocomplete aspect, but it's not the core nor anywhere near the full story.

This can apply equally to LLMs or humans. So what is the utility of the word if it just describes the whole range of things we are talking about?

Because the second part of my comment.

If you over simplify everything then everything is the same. You have to have nuance. So don't just argue for the sake of arguing. Take that same passion to deeply understand these systems. Take that same passion to try to understand yourself and those around you

They are an extremely sophisticated and impressive autocomplete. Nobody said they're not sophisticated or impressive.

This sounds like motte and bailey.. why bother calling something an autocomplete if not as a means to try to undermine its utility?

This is a https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Dissimile

Nobody said autocomplete lacks utility...

Right sure, but why specifically should they? What is gained or lost one way or another, if its just a matter of one mental model vs another? Models are definitionally useful abstractions, right? They aren't better or worse necessarily by only their bearing on reality, but what they do for us as models. So again, what's at stake here? What is the correct/good model we should have (instead of the autocompleter one), and what does it give us or articulate that others can't?

Models should be accurate. I was saying the mental model should be readjusted in that case because it does not reflect reality.

If they don’t care about understanding reality then sure, they can use whatever mental model they want.

> What is the correct/good model we should have (instead of the autocompleter one), and what does it give us or articulate that others can't?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com