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LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, now let's talk about what it means to "understand" something. Let's say a kid who's not unusually gifted/talented at math somehow ends up at the International Math Olympiad. Smart-enough kid, regularly gets 4.0+ grades in normal high school classes, but today Timmy got on the wrong bus. He does have a great calculator in his backpack -- heck, we'll give him a laptop with Mathematica installed -- so he figures, wh…

Calculators do not understand math, while both kids understand each other and the world around them. The calculator relies on an external intelligence. Don't stop trying. Predictability is an indicator of how well a theory describes the universe. That's what science is. The engineers have long predicted this stuff. LLM tech isn't really new. The size and speed of the machines is new. The more you understand about a t…

The more you understand about a topic, the better your predictions.

Indeed.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculators do not understand math, while both kids understand each other and the world around them. The calculator relies on an external intelligence. Don't stop trying. Predictability is an indicator of how well a theory describes the universe. That's what science is. The engineers have long predicted this stuff. LLM tech isn't really new. The size and speed of the machines is new. The more you understand about a t…

The more you understand about a topic, the better your predictions. Indeed.

I'm not sure what your level of expertise is with software but I got a lot out of some free tutorials on developing your own LLM and on ML. These are even available, free, directly from Google among many other sources.

I feel that my expectations surrounding "AI" are much more realistic than they were before building the tools.

If you haven't already, it's very much worth giving them a run through.

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