"LLMs are incredibly complex systems with emergent properties we do not fully understand, and it seems possible that because they run on top of a hugely complex model of one our most important cognitive tools (written language), they are capable of exploring the things we do with our cognitive skills in ways we would not imagine when considering their purely mechanistic or operational behavior. Or they may not."

Something like that.

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geraneum 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, if we're going based on feelings, that'd be an interesting take. Anything grounded in any research or actual science though?

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PaulDavisThe1st 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure. There are several papers (all the ones I've seen come from the companies themselves, which is unfortunate) which treat the LLMs as semi-biological systems and attempt to understand their behavior at a higher level, which suggests higher order behavior that isn't well predicted by the "probabilistic database" angle.

Here's one that I happen to have the URL handy for: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

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geraneum 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s not unfortunate, that’s conflict of interest by a party which directly profits from advertising their products as such.

But let’s assume this is not the case for a moment, following the article, there are some graphics and information, without providing and internal details for third party validation, no access or details to the training data, etc. basically not following any scientific methods which would reaffirm credibility.

I understand, that working with these models, it feels like they are more than “probabilistic databases” but they don’t have to be anything else in order to provide such interesting outputs.

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PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If that's your interpretation/assessment of that paper, then I don't think we have much more to say to each other. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that we're not operating in the same universe of understanding.

	▲	geraneum 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> that paper You have yet to share a paper. > just that we're not operating in the same universe of understanding. I concur.