Comment by simonw
6 months ago
Sure, I totally understand that.
I think "you give the LLM system a goal and it plans and then executes steps to achieve that goal" is still a useful way of explaining what it is doing to most people.
I don't even count that as anthropomorphism - you're describing what a system does, the same way you might say "the Rust compiler's borrow checker confirms that your memory allocation operations are all safe and returns errors if they are not".
It’s a useful approximation to a point. But it fails when you start looking at things like prompt injection. I’ve seen people completely baffled at why an LLM might start following instructions it finds in a random email, or just outright not believing it’s possible. It makes no sense if you think of an LLM as executing steps to achieve the goal you give it. It makes perfect sense if you understand its true goal.
I’d say this is more like saying that Rust’s borrow checker tries to ensure your program doesn’t have certain kinds of bugs. That is anthropomorphizing a bit: the idea of a “bug” requires knowing the intent of the author and the compiler doesn’t have that. It’s following a set of rules which its human creators devised in order to follow that higher level goal.