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An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

(simonwillison.net)
509 points tosh | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 09:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source

(the referenced HN thread starts at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060519)
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baq ◴[02 Sep 25 09:43 UTC] No.45100866[source]▶
It's also important to say what it isn't. LLM detractors, for lack of a better word, expect an oracle and then when they find out it's just a lossily compressed blob of human knowledge with natural language as a query interface they say the tool is useless.

I've got my opinion on whether that's useful or not and it's quite a bit more nuanced. You don't zoom-enhance JPEGs for a reason either.

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1. Zigurd ◴[02 Sep 25 12:44 UTC] No.45102386[source]▶
There are several human endeavors for which we select people of high aptitude and crush their souls in very demanding postgraduate professional education so they can remix a knowledge base that's difficult for humans to master and impossible for humans to fully encompass.

The worm in that apple is that you still need educated humans to catch the erroneous LLM output.