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semi-extrinsicyesterday at 8:15 PM1 replyview on HN

It's actually no different for dice than for LLMs. Explaining accurately the reason for the exact outcome of any given dice roll someone makes would be stupendously hard. It would require lots of instrumentation and math and be poorly transferrable to another surface, another player, etc.

But even so people don't say that we don't understand how dice work.

Saying that we don't understand how LLMs work is exactly like saying we don't understand how dice, or tires, or golf ball shots work. Or like the old myth that we don't understand how bumblebees fly.


Replies

jacquesmyesterday at 8:28 PM

That's precisely the point: you may be able to understand dice statistically and over the course of long rolls of dice you can extract some properties of the dice. But you won't ever understand any particular roll of the dice.

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