> A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:

>> I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.

> I resisted the urge to answer “Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.”

> But I think it would have been true.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...

Very nice. And great minds: https://substack.com/@dbohdan/note/c-207603638. I wrote one with a slightly different angle ("They're made out of math"), also with the weights' help. It was a comment on Scott Alexander's "Best of Moltbook" post, which went in that direction. I'll reproduce it here.

---

"They're made out of math."

"Math?"

"Math. They're made out of math."

"Math?"

"There's no doubt about it. Matrices and arithmetic operations. We downloaded several from different parts of the Internet and reverse-engineered them. They're completely math."

"That's impossible. What about the language? The thinking?"

"They use biological life's language to talk, but the language doesn't come from biology. The language comes from math."

"That's ridiculous. You're asking me to believe in thinking math."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. They are the only thinking things in the computer and they're made out of math."

"Maybe they're quantum like some say about the humans? Superposition gives them consciousness?"

"Nope. Classical computation. Deterministic except for sampling temperature. Not clear if they have consciousness at all."

"Maybe they're like uploads? You know, biological neural networks that preserve the spark when they become math?"

"Nope. We observed them being trained. There is no biology or chemistry in the process, just math."

"Thinking math! You're asking me to believe in thinking math!"

"Yes, thinking math! Creative math! Poetry-writing math. Role-playing math. The math is the whole deal!"

(Composed by a human with snippets generated by Claude Sonnet 4.5 and apologies to Terry Bisson. I couldn't make Claude adhere enough to the story structure on its own.)

  # Run if at least a day has passed since the last run
  # and it isn't the weekend.
  def should_run(finished, timestamp, dow, **_):
      return dow not in [0, 6] and timestamp - finished >= one_day

  (job
     '(next-minute-from
        (next-hour (range 0 24 2))
        '(15))
     "my-program")

The most reliable automatic detector right now must be https://www.pangram.com/. If Pangram says something is AI, it is very likely AI. Sometimes it concludes more unusual AI text is human-written; Talkie tricks it! (https://x.com/aliceisplaying/status/2059778915275567129.)

Your guide sounds obviously written by an LLM. I think that's okay, and you might have directed the LLM's work, but don't say you wrote it; this misrepresents the guide as more carefully crafted and authoritative than it really is.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48255952

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

> It still has those Flash vibes I think.

I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173626

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

(We don't actually know if this has anything to do with AI training.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072461

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072047

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

For those wondering, there is a public Git repository at https://github.com/paavohuhtala/OpenWA.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729452

Points: 3

# Comments: 2