> 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.