Comment by stingraycharles

3 hours ago

> Using the word “Mentoring” is anthropomorphic and subconsciously makes you think it will learn.

I think this is a bit pedantic. Obviously the parent you’re replying to is referring to the concept of “in-context learning”, which is the actual industry / academic term for this. So you feed it a paper, and then it can use that info, and it needs steering / “mentoring” to be guided into the right direction.

Heck the whole name of “machine learning” suggests these things can actually learn. “reasoning” suggests that these things can reason, instead of being fancy, directed autocomplete. Etc.

In other news: data hydration doesn’t actually make your data wet. People use / misuse words all the time, and that causes their meaning to evolve.

I agree it’s pedantic and personally don’t get bent out of shape with people anthropomorphizing the llms. But I do think you get better results if keep the text prediction machine mental model in your head as you work with them.

And that can be very hard to do given the ui we most interact with them in is a chat session.