Spoken Query Language? Just like SQL, but for unstructured blobs of text as a database and unstructured language as a query? Also known as Slop Query Language or just Slop Machine for its unpredictable results.

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Ukv a day ago | parent [-]

> Spoken Query Language? Just like SQL, but for unstructured blobs of text as a database and unstructured language as a query?

I feel that's more a description of a search engine. Doesn't really give an intuition of why LLMs can do the things they do (beyond retrieval), or where/why they'll fail.

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ACCount37 19 hours ago | parent [-]

If you want actionable intuition, try "a human with almost zero self-awareness".

"Self-awareness" used in a purely mechanical sense here: having actionable information about itself and its own capabilities.

If you ask an old LLM whether it's able to count the Rs in "strawberry" successfully, it'll say "yes". And then you ask it to do so, and it'll say "2 Rs". It doesn't have the self-awareness to know the practical limits of its knowledge and capabilities. If it did, it would be able to work around the tokenizer and count the Rs successfully.

That's a major pattern in LLM behavior. They have a lot of capabilities and knowledge, but not nearly enough knowledge of how reliable those capabilities are, or meta-knowledge that tells them where the limits of their knowledge lie. So, unreliable reasoning, hallucinations and more.

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Ukv 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Agree that's a better intuition, with pretraining pushing the model towards saying "I don't know" in the kinds of situations where people write that as opposed to by introspection of its own confidence.

	▲	ACCount37 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There appears to be a degree of "introspection of its own confidence" in modern LLMs. They can identify their own hallucinations, at a rate significantly better than chance. So there must be some sort of "do I recall this?" mechanism built into them. Even if it's not exactly a reliable mechanism. Anthropic has discovered that this is definitely the case for name recognition, and I suspect that names aren't the only things subject to a process like that.