The Many Ways that Digital Minds Can Know

Some interesting quotes:

1. LLMs do both of the things that their promoters and detractors say they do.
2. They do both of these at the same time on the same prompt.
3. It is very difficult from the outside to tell which they are doing.
4. Both of them are useful.

When a search engine is able to do this, it is able to compensate for a limited index size with intelligence. By making reasonable inferences about what page text is likely to satisfy what query text, it can satisfy more intents with fewer documents.

LLMs are not like this. The reasoning that they do is inscrutable and massive. They do not explain their reasoning in a way that we can trust is actually their reasoning, and not simply a textual description of what such reasoning might hypothetically be.

@AutoTLDR