LLMs as Index Funds

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more

Consequently, what has been offered as a criticism of LLM technology — that these algorithms only circulate different words without access to the real-world embodied referents — might not be the indictment critics think it is. LLMs are structuralist machines — they are practical actualizations of structural linguistic theory, where words have meani... See more