zlacker

Maybe it's just because so much of my work for so long has focused on models with hidden states but this is a fairly classical feature of some statistical models. One of the widely used LLM textbooks even started with latent variable models; LLMs are just latent variable models just on a totally different scale, both in terms of number of parameters but also model complexity. The scale is apparently important, but seeing them as another type of latent variable model sort of dehumanizes them for me.

Latent variable or hidden state models have their own history of being seen as spooky or mysterious though; in some ways the way LLMs are anthropomorphized is an extension of that.

I guess I don't have a problem with anthropomorphizing LLMs at some level, because some features of them find natural analogies in cognitive science and other areas of psychology, and abstraction is useful or even necessary in communicating and modeling complex systems. However, I do think anthropomorphizing leads to a lot of hype and tends to implicitly shut down thinking of them mechanistically, as a mathematical object that can be probed and characterized — it can lead to a kind of "ghost in the machine" discourse and an exaggeration of their utility, even if it is impressive at times.