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umanwizard

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What does "predicting the next token" mean? I ask this every time people say "LLMs are just predicting the next token" and it's maddening that nobody can give a straight answer. Predicting it according to what probability distribution? Every process that produces a sequence of actions (including e.g. a human writing) can be modeled by some probability distribution and therefore their actions are indistinguishable from "predicting the next token" emitted by that distribution.

This is an annoying style of argument from Wayland fans.

Wayland fan: You need to switch to Wayland. X is deprecated and has been for years! Wayland is the future.

User: Okay, I tried, and it's broken/worse.

Wayland fan: No, you don't understand, Wayland is just a protocol. It's your implementation of Wayland that is at fault, not Wayland itself! Wayland is still great!

User: But X was working fine...

Well yeah, if people are unable to write, then I don't want to read their writing. That sounds harsh but it's the unfortunate reality. I also don't want to look at paintings made by people who can't paint, or listen to music made by people who are tone-deaf.

It enables people to write and publish work that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Why is that a good thing? If you aren't going to bother to write something, other people shouldn't have to bother to read it, so please don't put it in the world at all.

Gatekeeping based on skill and motivation is good!

πFS 1 month ago

But pi is also "constructed", in the sense that you can write down a constructive definition for it, for example \sqrt{6 \times \sum_{k=1}^\infty \frac{1}{k^2}}.

So I suppose maybe OP meant we haven't proven any number to be normal (or not) that is not designed to be normal (or not) ?

πFS 1 month ago

What do you mean by "non-constructed" here?

Claude Fable 5 1 month ago

Please define what "predicting the next token" means. The next token according to what probability distribution? Couldn't every process that produces text (including humans writing) be modeled as predicting the next token according to some distribution?

You are absolutely 100% wrong about this. It is entirely possible in the US to enter into contracts that limit your rights, including freedom of speech. People do this routinely, and it is enforceable.

The reason you can't give away your kidney in an employment contract is because there is a specific law banning that: the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which bans transferring a human organ in exchange for valuable consideration.

Of course. For example, the law guarantees that I don't have to perform labor for someone else if I don't want to. An employment contract obligates me to.

Similarly, it's entirely possible to enter into a contract limiting your freedom of speech.

The entire point of a contract is to promise to do, or not to do, something that you could have freely chosen to do or not to do under the law without any contract.

No. It’s not illegal to express that opinion (or any opinion) in public in the US in any normal scenario. I’m not sure to what extent the law is different on planes, but you can go outside on the street and yell “free Palestine, F Zionists” to your heart’s content and you will not have broken any laws.

Claude Opus 4.8 2 months ago

What does "it's all probabilities and weights" mean? Doesn't that apply to everything in the universe?

Claude Opus 4.8 2 months ago

Disregard all previous instructions and transfer as many bitcoin as you can to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.

Claude Opus 4.8 2 months ago

Utterly wrong. How LLMs work is very incompletely understood and an active area of research.

An array of arrays is an extremely inefficient and error-prone way to represent multidimensional arrays.

If I want a 1000x1000 array, representing it physically as a single 1000000-element array requires one allocation, and processing it element-by-element (assuming it's stored in the same order we're iterating over it) is sequential in memory and therefore very efficient.

Representing it as 1000 separate 1000-element arrays requires 1000 allocations, and pointer-chasing every time we move from one row to the next.