The first few times I used a rotary sander were similar to a slot machine too -- scary times for a bit there! Fortunately, and I think it applies to LLMs too, you can get more reliable results with experience.

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Verdex 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't personally like the comparison.

On the one hand we've got a spinning disk.

And on the other hand we've got the latent space of everything a human has ever written sitting inside a harness of ever increasing complexity.

Even if you put aside the qualitative nature of the analogy, the quantitative difference is so great that I'm not convinced there's any meat to get out of it.

Edit:

Actually here's a competing analogy. 210 BC emperor Qin Shi Huang drinks mercury in an attempt to live forever.

Then in 1996 Dr. Karen Wetterhahn has a drop of an organic mercury compound soak right through her latex glove, through her skin, and into her bloodstream. Where it kills her after a year of worsening physical symptoms.

Mercury, a tool that was super scary thousands of years ago, but remains unbelievably dangerous nightmare fuel.

	▲	tomrod 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, I love rotary sanders too, but I'm not sure I'd call them the latent space of everything a human has ever written sitting in a harness of ever increasing complexity. That's not really my form of woodworking. But LLMs do fit on discs, even spinning HDDs on occasion (though I suspect it would be low tokens for second). Mercury is incredible useful despite its hazards. Nitric acid is worse in negative affect despite its utility -- acid that rots your bones. When I visited fabs they were careful to point out which vats would burn me and which would make me instead lose the bone in an arm. Fortunately I survived the visits. A rotary sander can damage plenty if you're not careful. All these really are the same tune.