Comment by tobiasSoftware
1 year ago
"I find it useful to think “what can I expect from speaking with the dataset of combined writing of people”, rather than treating a basic LLM as a mind."
I've been doing this as well, mentally I think of LLMs as the librarians of the internet.
They're bad librarians. They're not bad, they do a bad job of being librarians, which is a good thing! They can't quite tell you the exact quote, but they do recall the gist, they're not sure it was Gandhi who said that thing but they think he did, it might be in this post or perhaps one of these. They'll point you to the right section of the library to find what you're after, but make sure you verify it!
They are librarians, just that it happens to be the library of Babel.
Book golems