[HN Gopher] A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
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       A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 8 points
       Date   : 2025-07-06 22:26 UTC (33 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (addxorrol.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (addxorrol.blogspot.com)
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | I'm afraid I'll take an anthropomorphic analogy over "An LLM
       | instantiated with a fixed random seed is a mapping of the form
       | (Rn)^c - (Rn)^c" any day of the week.
        
       | szvsw wrote:
       | So the author's core view is ultimately a Searle-like view: a
       | computational, functional, syntactic rules based system cannot
       | reproduce a mind. Plenty of people will agree, plenty of people
       | will disagree, and the answer is probably unknowable and just
       | comes down to whatever axioms you subscribe to in re:
       | consciousness.
       | 
       | The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for
       | us to ignore any anthropomorphic representations and focus on the
       | more concrete, material, technical systems - I'm with them
       | there... but only to a point. The flip side of all this is of
       | course the idea that there is still _something_ emergent,
       | unplanned, and mind- _like_. So even if it is a stochastic system
       | following rules, clearly the rules are complex enough (to the
       | tune of billions of operations, with signals propagating through
       | some sort of resonant structure, if you take a more filter
       | impulse response like view of a sequential matmuls) to result in
       | emergent properties. Even if _we_ (people interested in LLMs with
       | at least some level of knowledge of ML mathematics and systems)
       | "know better" than to believe these systems to possess morals,
       | ethics, feelings, personalities, etc, the vast majority of people
       | do not and will not take that view, and for all intents and
       | purposes the systems _will_ seem to have those things, and so it
       | seems like it is in fact useful to ask questions from that lens
       | as well.
       | 
       | In other words, just as it's useful to analyze and study these
       | things as the purely technical systems they ultimately are, it is
       | also, probably, useful to analyze them from the qualitative,
       | ephemeral, experiential perspective that most people engage with
       | them from, no?
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-06 23:00 UTC)