Your paper reminds me of a passage, likely one of the last things T.S. Eliot wrote, from `Little Gidding` in which one stanza describes a moment in history when Germany bombed England long before the end of the war:
> "A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England."
Asking an LLM about this verse, it seems to understand history is a pattern and that history is used to predict the next event in a sequence but it really doesn't understand the significance of the author writing "History is now and England."
I agree with this output:
> In essence, the stanza argues that history—composed of key, enduring moments—is vital for redemption and identity. Without it, a people are lost in time. This concept parallels how LLMs work: by analyzing and learning from historical (past) data, they identify patterns that allow them to generate future text. While LLMs don’t “predict the future” in a prophetic sense, understanding and leveraging patterns—much like those in history—enables them to produce output that reflects continuity, context, and nuance.
Thus, while the poem and LLMs operate in very different realms (human experience vs. statistical computation), both rely on the idea that recognizing patterns from the past is crucial to shaping or anticipating what comes next.