Good points. I looked up the definition for prediction and I suppose I'm stretching what I view as prediction.
> A prediction is a statement about what you think will happen in the future, often based on experience or knowledge. It can also be referred to as a forecast or an informed guess
Based on my reading of this definition, compression may inform prediction but it is not itself prediction. The examples cited in the blog post are examples of probabilistic recall based on past events or instances. More context means a higher chance that the recall is more likely to be aligned.
But it's hard for me to accept the leap to compression == prediction because in my mind a prediction is an informed guess about something that hasn't yet come to pass. But thinking more about it, time is a human concept and so who's to say the temporal reference means anything at all here. Maybe probabilistic recall is the same as predictive forecasting if time is an invented concept and essentially means nothing?
Is everything fundamentally deterministic if you know everything in the universe or does free will exist?
IDK to be honest, I'm just more frequently surprised by new things that happen every day than I am at things that stay the same, even if mostly things stay the same. Maybe I just don't notice them and nothing actually ever happens.
Side note: the inevitable consequence of this line of reasoning will eventually become that LLMs given enough power are in fact intelligent and sentient, and I'm worried about how that affects humanity as a whole. Are we about to subjugate the most intelligent thing humanity has ever created, or is it about to subjugate us?
The rabbit hole gets deep quick when making the leap between a fancy recall mechanism and novel prediction, but I agree they're not that different in the end. I just believe it's important to be nuanced or else we'll miss when AGI actually happens (maybe it's already here).