Comment by kremi
18 days ago
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I don’t think essentialist explanations about how LLMs work are very helpful. It doesn’t give any meaningful explanation of the high level nature of the pattern matching that LLMs are capable of. And it draws a dichotomic line between basic pattern matching and knowledge and reasoning, when it is much more complex than that.
It's especially important not to antropomorphise when there is a risk people actually mistake something for a humanlike being.
What is least helpful is using misleading terms like this, because it makes reasoning about this more difficult. If we assume the model "knows" something, we might reasonably assume it will always act according to that knowledge. That's not true for an LLM, so it's a term that should clearly be a oided.