alt Hacker NewsI am antagonistic to the adoption of LLMs for economic, social, political and environmental reasons.
Despite that, I would say this description of what they/how they work is so ridiculously simplistic that it verges on dangerous. "It's just a probabilistic database" is about as bad as a take on human beings that they are "Just meat, with some chemical energy -> electrical energy transformation", or even traditional computers as "nothing but logic gates".
Which is to say, the description is not wrong, but completely misses the point.
Replies
geraneum • yesterday at 11:43 PM
> is about as bad as a take
What would be a good take here?
➕ show 1 reply
tourmalinetaco • yesterday at 11:18 PM
Then what is the point? You didn’t actually describe where your definition differs and why. What makes it “dangerous” to think that way?
➕ show 1 reply
I think the point, with a more charitable reading of the parent comment, is that people forget the fundamental underlying technology and its inherent limitations.
"It's just a four wheeled platform powered by a box of controlled explosions" isn't a terribly useful description of a car until you get into a conversation with someone who thinks their car is depressed because it spends most of its time locked up in a garage.