▲ | gwern 15 hours ago | |
This always frustrates me about paper abstracts. Whether it's economics or AI, everyone seems to make a point of being as vague as possible, when it would sometimes take 1 tiny word to clarify it hugely . You'll see paper abstracts talk about how they analyze "an important and widely deployed commercial family of large language models (LLMs)" and then you have to skim 10 pages before you finally find out that they mean 'GPT'. I don't think the authors are even doing it maliciously or deliberately, because it's like how students or kids struggle to write anything. It's just a fallback when you're struggling to condense it and have gotten lost in your forest. Like how you can ask someone, "OK, that's all great, but what did you do? What are you trying to say here?" "Oh, I Xed the Y with Z." "There you go. That's your abstract." |