Comment by 16bitvoid
1 hour ago
That's just what some people generally use to refer to LLM input string/prompt/message/etc. The only thing the LLM can do is return information...in the form of text, so every request is one for information.
If we want to get really pedantic, every generated token is the answer to the query: what's the next most probable token in this sequence of tokens?
If "query" doesn't imply intent by the user, it ceases to be a useful word. You can acrobat your way to imagine a digital system has agency to ask a question before it receives bits, but then any transfer of data could be called a query.
When I post this http request containing this reply, you could say my machine is querying the server to ask "what did you do with the message I just gave you", but then query stops having any useful semantic value to distinguish it from "request"
Regardless, this is tangential. I don't disagree that a lot of LLM use is not in pursuit of knowledge, but enough of it is for me to think that preferring LLMs not to exist is a hard position to defend, at least without making the case for existential doom.