[perching_aix]

So you work on inference engines, and don't see at all what'd be hilariously disingenuous and reductive about describing how LLMs operate as "just parroting the most statistically likely next token"? It is literally* what they do, yes. And only literally, with a big asterisk of "non-colloquial meaning" after the word "statistically". Like how "significant" means something pretty different, albeit related, in academic writing vs everyday speech.

It's equivalent to professing how you just make apple pies from scratch, while your first step is to always reinvent the universe.

You're further magically blind to this operational fact being weaponized as a trope for furthering anti-ai sentiment (i.e. that it's a political dogwhistle at this point), and to thus you participating in that every time you repeat it?

* Ignoring the decoding caveat I already mentioned, along with the countless ways they're steered. There isn't jack that's likely about some of the responses they produce, and intentionally so. Including the whole chat partner act.

[stevenhuang]

Look at his comments here.

Safe to say there's a cognitive block and until he tries to approach this topic in good faith he'll simply never understand. Lol.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48429027

[perching_aix]

It's so beyond tiresome. It's a classic case of someone being technically correct, and abusing the gap between that, and what people actually gather from it, for sentiment manipulation (willfully or otherwise). And I have a pretty hard time believing at this point that it's the otherwise.

I really don't know what's so interesting about auto-complete or next token prediction that it captures these people's attention so much. They're so blatantly not the salient quality to these products that is of interest to the common discourse, it's just baffling.