[chrisco255]

While the input resolution is indeed high, it's not as if any animal on earth has access to photographic memory of all that data. It is so ephemeral you could scarcely tell me what the last 10 people you passed on the street were wearing, even if it was 10 minutes ago.

[jahewson]

At inference time, an LLM does not have access to all its training data either.

[chrisco255]

At inference time, a human being has access to 5 to 9 variables at most an average human can hold in their head at any given time. But I can feed pages and pages to an LLM and it has a perfect representation of every single word and letter in its working memory. It also has access to a look up table of billions of statistical correlations for what the next word or block of words in any sentence should be given the perfect priors.

If I'm talking to you, especially in person, I won't be able to tell you what the second word of three sentences ago was. In fact, I might not have even been paying attention, because I'm already thinking at a higher level about what you're communicating to me and the word wasn't all that important. But a LLM certainly uses this information to guide its responses (along with its ginormous lookup table).