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To quote Luke Skywalker: Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.




Which is why I keep saying that anthropomorphizing LLMs gives you good high-order intuitions about them, and should not be discouraged.

Consider: GP would've been much more correct if they said "It's just a person on a chip." Still wrong, but much less, in qualitative fashion, than they are now.


No, it does not, it just adds to the risk that you'd be fooled by them or the corporations that produce them and surveil you through their SaaS-models.

It's a person in the same sense as a Markov chain is one, or the bot in the reception on Starship Titanic, i.e. not at all.


Just a weird little guy.


Similar analogy, yes.

FWIW, I prefer my "little people on a chip" because this is a deliberate riff on SoC, aka. System on a Chip, aka. an actual component you put when designing computer systems. The implication being, when you design information processing systems, the box with "LLM" on it should go where you'd consider putting a box with "Person" on it, not where you'd put "Database" or any other software/hardware box.


No, it is not. It's a funny way of compressing and querying data, nothing else.

It is probabilistic unlike a database which is not. It is also a lossy way to compress data. We could go on about the differences but those two things make it not a database.

Edit: unless we are talking about MongoDB. It will only keep your data if you are lucky and might lose it. :)


No, it is still just a database. It is a way to store and query information, it is nothing else.

It's not just the weirdness in Mongo that could exhibit non-deterministic behaviour, some common indexing techniques do not guarantee order and/or exhaustiveness.

Let it go, LLM:s and related compression techniques aren't very special, and neither are chatbots or copy-paste-oriented software development. Optimising them for speed or manipulation does not change this, at least not from a technical perspective.




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