Comment by sdwr

The "pattern matching" perspective is true if you zoom in close enough, just like "protein reactions in water" is true for brains. But if you zoom out you see both humans and LLMs interact with external environments which provide opportunity for novel exploration. The true source of originality is not inside but in the environment. Making it be all about the model inside is a mistake, what matters more than the model is the data loop and solution space being explored.

> I don't think it's accurate to describe LLMs as pattern matching

I’m talking about the inference step, which uses tensor geometry arithmetic to find patterns in text. We don’t understand what those patterns are but it’s clear it’s doing some heavy lifting since llm inference is expressing logic and reasoning under the guise of our reductive “next token prediction”

"Pattern matching" is not sufficiently specified here for us to say if LLMs do pattern matching or not. E.g. we can say that an LLM predicts the next token because that token (or rather, its embedding) is the best "match" to the previous tokens, which form a path ("pattern") in embedding space. In this sense LLMs are most definitely pattern matching. Under other formulations of the term, they may not be (e.g. when pattern matching refers to abstraction or abstracting to actual logical patterns, rather than strictly semantic patterns).

Yes, the world model building is achieved via pattern matching and happens during ingestion and training, but that is also part of the intelligence.

Which is even more true for humans.