Technology

It's processing data alright, it processes the atomic and cellular structures of grass and fingers into spinach and flesh paste.

And likewise, neither it, nor any LLM, are making decisions at all.

Is a plinko disc making decisions as it tumbles from the top to the bottom through all those pegs? Is the board making the decision? Or is it neither and simply mathematics plus random chance being roped in for randomness? That is exactly what LLMs do.

Terms like "decision" and "lie" and "know" are all things that just do not apply to an LLM, just like your phone keyboard doesn't know what the fuck "what" and "the" are, it just has a lookup table that includes how "what" is often followed by "is" and "the", and "the" is frequently followed by "fuck". But it doesn't "know" that in any meaning of the word "know".

This is what we mean when we say not to personify. A training set of data, even factual, just is converted into a series of matrices of vectors that include those patterns, but not the information itself. "Sky is blue" is not something you can grep from the resulting blob, nor the hex equivalent, or anything else. It simply contains indexed patterns that map those arrangements of letters, over and over.

So yes, they're doing what they're programmed to do precisely. It's just that "what they're programmed to do" is only "mimic patterns of word arrangements", and not "know facts". These things work at a far lower level than that concept.