alt Hacker NewsBecause to the general public, LLMs are an example of Clarke's Third Law. Most folks, who are not remotely close to even a basic understanding of how LLMs operate at a technical level and only view their output cannot possibly evaluate what they're experiencing other than to believe it's conscious, alive, and/or magic.
Most people on Earth try to put what they're seeing into the context of what they understand; mental gymnastics to try and understand what is happening based on their prior experience. They have absolutely 0 understanding of how it works under the hood so, to them, it must be alive.
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emp17344 • yesterday at 4:42 PM
And this apparently also applies to many HN users, many of whom should know better.
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> a basic understanding of how LLMs operate at a technical level
An LLM with CoT is Turing-complete. Training is, basically, compression (the training data gets lossily compressed into the model's weights). The information-theoretic limit of compression is an algorithm that reproduces functionality of a system that produced the training data.
No "magic" is required to get to a system that reproduces at least some facets of the human brain functionality.
Three years ago I was skeptical that stochastic gradient descent (and other known techniques) are the way. But evidence kept piling up.