[dTal]

Depending on what you mean by "weighted sample", that's either trivially true (the network is of course a function of its training data and nothing else) or trivially false (the network generalizes over the training data and has not memorized it). It is not a good intuition pump for why an LLM can hold up one end of a conversation, or follow novel instructions - it is not reading from a script, nor regurgitating chopped up pieces of text like a Markov chain. It is doing something very clever in a way that is not obvious.

>It has a relationship with reality insofar as one exists within the training data

This is true of anything that learns.

[dartos]

> this is true of anything that learns

Sure, but most things that learn have actual reality as a training set. LLMs have human curated data, which isn’t and can’t be perfectly representative of reality.

[__loam]

Couldn't have said it better myself.