alt Hacker NewsThis is not even remotely accurate. "Baking information" like into a "printed encyclopedia" is memorization. It has been shown, time and time again, that LLMs do not merely memorize. It is not even possible for it to do so at scale. It can memorize some things, yes, but it is forced during the training procedure to bake general concepts into intermediate layers (this is why transfer learning works), analogous to compression. One can make several arguments that compression and intrinisic feature sparsity is the closest mathematical explanation to understanding that we have.
It is completely possible to ask an LLM a series of increasingly more esoteric and discrete questions until you find precisely what information did, or did not make it into the model. If you know something rare and the LLM does not, you'll immediately see when it's hallucinating an answer or answering factually.