from Balaji | by Balaji

The fact that LLMs are bootstrapped from human language — and not from, say, sensor data — means they arguably are more human-like than a genuine alien. It’s trained on Reddit posts, not born on a remote planet.

Many theories about what genuinely alien life looks like. Perhaps you can get something like the complexity of carbon-based life with silicon. Or you just find “vanilla” carbon-based life in oceans like that of Europa. [1]: t.co/elbzEpPvq5 [2]: t.co/6WvGI3R3RK t.co/247YAV8diz

Oh, it’s a huge difference. Human language encodes so many assumptions based on our biology. A small example might be — why don’t we have many different words for what magnetic fields feel like, but do for what foods taste like? We have a dedicated sense for taste. t.co/VM4Gz5Zs1e