[squidbeak]

What about Alphafold?

> But the AI doesn't even have "own words"; they are the training data's words.

If the AI understands those words, in what sense aren't they its 'own words'? Are you arguing that nothing but neologisms count?

[kazinator]

I would say that I don't consider that to be an LLM.

[Legend2440]

It's not literally an LLM because the L stands for language, and it's not trained on language.

But it is the same transformer architecture, and it is able to generate novel proteins in the same way that an LLM is able to generate novel sentences. AlphaFold 3 is a diffusion model, so it's most similar to the AI art generators.

[kazinator]

But it's used on the thing that it's trained for. LLMs are trained on language, but then used as a substitute for thinking, which it naively looks like they are doing due to the smooth language.

Protein folding is a kind of syntax. If you train on protein folding and then use it to obtain protein folding results, you are using a screwdriver to drive a screw: that checks out.

Nobody should be arguing along lines analogous to the claim that a good neural net trained on handwritten digits is not suitable for classifying handwritten digits.