Comment by thomassmith65

Ach, I'm having trouble getting the distinction across:

It's not hard to write and understand an ANN. It's like a one or two day project. LLMs, I assume, aren't all that much harder: fewer LOC than most most GUI apps.

It's also not hard to understand why ANNs and LLMs work. It's only conceptually one step further than "write millions of programs randomly and stop when one actually works"

The part that we don't understand, and that will take many years to understand, is what behaviours and abilities we can expect from a massive, trained LLM.

The fact that (A) it is so easy to understand how to create an ANN, and (B) it takes so few LOC to create one, really underlines the point: the interesting, complex behaviour is something that 'emerges' (from simply adding more nodes to the spec) and that nobody today has any hint of how to code procedurally.