How LLMs work • Hacker News Board

Re: How LLMs work

#291

Post by darksim905 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

cloche wrote: post #192

darksim905 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone who is curious about the first paragraph here, this is actually a great video overview of how LLM works and the tokenization part. Tangentially related: This part always seemed fuzzy to me, especially when dealing with data scientists and how they talk about how 'ML' looks at problems. I had this issue when working at a SIEM vendor where they kept going on about use case development having to be designed a…

> this is actually a great video overview of how LLM works and the tokenization part Did you mean to link to the video? I would be interested.

Oops! Here you go - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI

Re: How LLMs work

#292

Post by hackinthebochs » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC

Borealid wrote: post #290

hackinthebochs wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I say they're equivalent because it is possible to losslessly convert one to the other by wasting massive amounts of disk space and time. There is a classical algorithm for every quantum algorithm if you're willing to waste a massive amount of space and time. There is a finite-state automata that can recognize any string some Turing machine can recognize. Yet we recognize these as distinct classes of computation. Ma…

Just to make sure I've understood you... Are you arguing that with a set of identically-behaving black boxes, one could be "reasoning" and one could be "not reasoning", and a person would need to look inside the boxes at how they function to decide? Remember, if the mapping from input to output is identical, there exists no test operating on the machines' output that can differentiate them. You can't tell from "conve…

>Are you arguing that with a set of identically-behaving black boxes, one could be "reasoning" and one could be "not reasoning", and a person would need to look inside the boxes at how they function to decide?

Absolutely! Inside one of the black boxes could be an audio device replaying a tape. The other could be a person thinking and responding. The massive lookup table construct people like to reference is just another kind of recorder, it takes every possible conversation that could happen in some finite sequence of characters and produces the precomputed continuation on demand. No one ever asks where those conversations came from. If God has to imagine them in his mind, conversing with the lookup table is just conversing with God.

Re: How LLMs work

#293

Post by Borealid » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #292

Borealid wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to make sure I've understood you... Are you arguing that with a set of identically-behaving black boxes, one could be "reasoning" and one could be "not reasoning", and a person would need to look inside the boxes at how they function to decide? Remember, if the mapping from input to output is identical, there exists no test operating on the machines' output that can differentiate them. You can't tell from "conve…

>Are you arguing that with a set of identically-behaving black boxes, one could be "reasoning" and one could be "not reasoning", and a person would need to look inside the boxes at how they function to decide? Absolutely! Inside one of the black boxes could be an audio device replaying a tape. The other could be a person thinking and responding. The massive lookup table construct people like to reference is just anot…

Okay, understood. You are making a variant of the Chinese Room argument in which you allow some types of computer programs (but not others) to have reason/sentience. I'm not entirely sure what specific lines you're drawing between the programs (what makes a deterministic transformer with sampling temperature zero "not a recording" but a hash table "a recording"?) but that's not super important.

There is nothing wrong about having that philosophy, and I respect it, but personally I think if it's impossible to tell two things apart using any external observation there is not a meaningful difference between those two things. "Smells like a rose" and all that.