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An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

(simonwillison.net)
509 points tosh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

(the referenced HN thread starts at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45060519)
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latexr ◴[] No.45101170[source]
A lossy encyclopaedia should be missing information and be obvious about it, not making it up without your knowledge and changing the answer every time.

When you have a lossy piece of media, such as a compressed sound or image file, you can always see the resemblance to the original and note the degradation as it happens. You never have a clear JPEG of a lamp, compress it, and get a clear image of the Milky Way, then reopen the image and get a clear image of a pile of dirt.

Furthermore, an encyclopaedia is something you can reference and learn from without a goal, it allows you to peruse information you have no concept of. Not so with LLMs, which you have to query to get an answer.

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simonw ◴[] No.45101190[source]
I think you are missing the point of the analogy: a lossy encyclopedia is obviously a bad idea, because encyclopedias are meant to be reliable places to look up facts.
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1. butlike ◴[] No.45105765[source]
I don't like the confident hallucinations of LLMs either, but don't they rewrite and add entries in the encyclopedia every few years? Implicitly that makes your old copy "lossy"

Again, never really want a confidently-wrong encyclopedia, though