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by blovescoffee 978 days ago
> It's surprising because it wasn't the intent of LLMs. LLMs are just predictive models that guess the most likely next word. Having the results make sense was never a priority.

If you read through what Hinton or any of his famous students have said, it genuinely was and is surprising. Everything from AlexNet to the jump between GPT-2 to GPT-3 was surprising. We can't actually explain that jump in a formal way, just reasonable guesses. If something is unexplainable, it's unpredictable. Prediction without understanding is a vague guess and the results will come as a surprise.