I’m shocked how many otherwise well-informed people don’t understand or agree with this very fundamental fact of just how little we actually understand about why LLMs work as well as they do. They figure “it’s science, of course there’s math and theory behind it.”

AI research is almost as purely empirical as the gradient descent loops its practitioners use to optimize their models. “Why” anything at all works is barely an afterthought.

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chrisjj 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I’m shocked how many otherwise well-informed people don’t understand or agree with this very fundamental fact of just how little we actually understand about why LLMs work as well as they do.

Well-informed people understand that LLMs work as well as they do for the same reasons as horoscopes, fortune-telling and homeopathy.

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ohyoutravel an hour ago | parent [-]

They work great for banging out POC apps or writing boilerplate code. This is a real use.

	▲	nvme0n1p1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Homeopathy triggers the placebo effect. That is a real use.

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bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> why LLMs work as well as they do.

That's a very different claim from being "poorly understood" though. The emergent properties of any system with billions of parameters is hard to understand completely, that's the fault of data science more than computer science or even mathematics.

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semiquaver 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think ”poorly understood” is accurate. Understanding has levels. How brains think is also poorly understood.

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bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I disagree, because you can represent the constituent parts of any AI model as code and data. We can reliably build AI with this knowledge, but not brains.

Understanding does have layers, and that's why "poorly understood" is a meaningless goalpost. A book can be well understood without researching the gematria behind character's the names when you write them in reverse. An LLM can be well-understood even if you don't comprehensively test each quantization for miraculous unexpected behavior at the FFN level.

	▲	nvme0n1p1 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Your DNA is merely data, and humans can reliably make more of it too.
	▲	s1artibartfast an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A book can be poorly understood if you know it's made out of paper and ink, but can't read. The contents would be are meaningless symbols and numbers. You might note that some patterns of symbols repeat, but be completely clueless why or what it represents. Notably, you could still print them all day.