Imagine you were born with a super-human ability to memorize and instantly recall everything you've ever read.
One day, you decide you're going to read all of the Chinese writing you can get your hands on. You scour the internet, book stores, your local library, and you read all of it. And because of your super-human memory, you are able to recall all of it in an instant. There is a catch though - you don't know any Chinese. You don't know how to speak it, and you don't know how to read or write it. So as you were reading all of this material, none of the characters on the page were being saved in your brain with any meaning behind them, they were being saved only as raw characters.
But because you're able to recall everything you've ever read, you're able to recall these characters. And so, as you start going through them in your memory, you start to spot patterns. You notice that certain characters are often preceded by one of several other characters. And you start to see that these types of patterns show up all over the place.
You start to wonder if you could actually write Chinese. So you find a blog post written in Chinese that was authored after your initial ingestion of everything you could find. But rather than reading all of it, you only read the first half, and then you write what you think the next character will be. And then you read all of that again, including the character you added to the end, and you write what you think the next character after that will be, on and on until you think you're done. And then you compare your prediction with the real thing, to see how close you got.
But you're limited, because none of these characters have any actual meaning to you. So you enlist a friend who can read Chinese, and they are able to help you see where you're getting confused. They don't try to translate any of these characters into English for you, but they're able to point out how certain characters change the trajectory of the text. And so you keep quizzing yourself in this manner, showing your friend your output compared to the real output and then taking their advice into account.
Eventually you get good enough that you are able to start replying to posts on a Chinese forum. You don't actually know what the topics are that are being discussed, but you know that you've read a lot about them, and your posts are getting a lot of up votes.
As far as anyone on the forum is concerned, you clearly know Chinese. And in some very real sense, you do know Chinese. In fact, you're widely regarded as the most helpful member on the forum. But in the most literal sense of the phrase, you have no clue what you're talking about.
Congratulations, you're an LLM.
Imagine you were born with a super-human ability to memorize and instantly recall everything you've ever read.
One day, you decide you're going to read all of the Chinese writing you can get your hands on. You scour the internet, book stores, your local library, and you read all of it. And because of your super-human memory, you are able to recall all of it in an instant. There is a catch though - you don't know any Chinese. You don't know how to speak it, and you don't know how to read or write it. So as you were reading all of this material, none of the characters on the page were being saved in your brain with any meaning behind them, they were being saved only as raw characters.
But because you're able to recall everything you've ever read, you're able to recall these characters. And so, as you start going through them in your memory, you start to spot patterns. You notice that certain characters are often preceded by one of several other characters. And you start to see that these types of patterns show up all over the place.
You start to wonder if you could actually write Chinese. So you find a blog post written in Chinese that was authored after your initial ingestion of everything you could find. But rather than reading all of it, you only read the first half, and then you write what you think the next character will be. And then you read all of that again, including the character you added to the end, and you write what you think the next character after that will be, on and on until you think you're done. And then you compare your prediction with the real thing, to see how close you got.
But you're limited, because none of these characters have any actual meaning to you. So you enlist a friend who can read Chinese, and they are able to help you see where you're getting confused. They don't try to translate any of these characters into English for you, but they're able to point out how certain characters change the trajectory of the text. And so you keep quizzing yourself in this manner, showing your friend your output compared to the real output and then taking their advice into account.
Eventually you get good enough that you are able to start replying to posts on a Chinese forum. You don't actually know what the topics are that are being discussed, but you know that you've read a lot about them, and your posts are getting a lot of up votes.
As far as anyone on the forum is concerned, you clearly know Chinese. And in some very real sense, you do know Chinese. In fact, you're widely regarded as the most helpful member on the forum. But in the most literal sense of the phrase, you have no clue what you're talking about.
Congratulations, you're an LLM.