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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

(addxorrol.blogspot.com)
477 points zdw | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.235s | source
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Al-Khwarizmi ◴[] No.44487564[source]
I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent.

The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing an UI events API and you were talking about zeros and ones, or voltages in transistors. Technically fine but totally useless to reach any conclusion about the high-level system.

We need a higher abstraction level to talk about higher level phenomena in LLMs as well, and the problem is that we have no idea what happens internally at those higher abstraction levels. So, considering that LLMs somehow imitate humans (at least in terms of output), anthropomorphization is the best abstraction we have, hence people naturally resort to it when discussing what LLMs can do.

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1. lawlessone ◴[] No.44492492[source]
One thing i find i keep forgetting is that asking an LLM why it makes a particular decision is almost pointless.

It's reply isn't actually going to be why i did a thing. It's reply is going to be whatever is the most probably string of words that fit as a reason.