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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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475 points zdw | 1 comments | 06 Jul 25 22:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.315s | source
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chaps ◴[06 Jul 25 23:04 UTC] No.44484946[source]▶
I highly recommend playing with embeddings in order to get a stronger intuitive sense of this. It really starts to click that it's a representation of high dimensional space when you can actually see their positions within that space.
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perching_aix ◴[06 Jul 25 23:26 UTC] No.44485088[source]▶
> of this

You mean that LLMs are more than just the matmuls they're made up of, or that that is exactly what they are and how great that is?

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chaps ◴[06 Jul 25 23:31 UTC] No.44485124[source]▶
Not making a qualitative assessment of any of it. Just pointing out that there are ways to build separate sets of intuition outside of using the "usual" presentation layer. It's very possible to take a red-team approach to these systems, friend.
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cootsnuck ◴[07 Jul 25 15:26 UTC] No.44491363[source]▶
They don't want to. It seems a lot of people are uncomfortable and defensive about anything that may demystify LLMs.

It's been a wake up call for me to see how many people in the tech space have such strong emotional reactions to any notions of trying to bring discourse about LLMs down from the clouds.

The campaigns by the big AI labs have been quite successful.

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1. perching_aix ◴[07 Jul 25 18:11 UTC] No.44493126[source]▶
Do you actually consider this is an intellectually honest position? That you have thought about this long and hard, like you present this, second guessed yourself a bunch, tried to critique it, and this is still what you ended up converging on?

But let me substantiate before you (rightly) accuse me of just posting a shallow dismissal.

> They don't want to.

Who's they? How could you possibly know? Are you a mind reader? Worse, a mind reader of the masses?

> It seems a lot of people are uncomfortable and defensive about anything that may demystify LLMs.

That "it seems" is doing some serious work over there. You may perceive and describe many people's comments as "uncomfortable and defensive", but that's entirely your own head cannon. All it takes is for someone to simply disagree. It's worthless.

Have you thought about other possible perspectives? Maybe people have strong opinions because they consider what things present as more important than what they are? [0] Maybe people have strong opinions because they're borrowing from other facets of their personal philosophies, which is what they actually feel strongly about? [1] Surely you can appreciate that there's more to a person than what equivalent-presenting "uncomfortable and defensive" comments allow you to surmise? This is such a blatant textbook kneejerk reaction. "They're doing the thing I wanted to think they do anyways, so clearly they do it for the reasons I assume. Oh how correct I am."

> to any notions of trying to bring discourse about LLMs down from the clouds

(according to you)

> The campaigns by the big AI labs have been quite successful.

(((according to you)))

"It's all the big AI labs having successfully manipulated the dumb sheep which I don't belong to!" Come on... Is this topic really reaching political grifting kind of levels?

[0] tangent: if a feature exists but even after you put an earnest effort into finding it you still couldn't, does that feature really exist?

[1] philosophy is at least kind of a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...