When you ask an LLM a reasoning question. You’re not expecting it to think for you, you’re expecting that it has crawled multiple people asking semantically the same question and getting semantically the same answer, from other people, that are now encoded in its vectors.

That’s why you can ask it. because it encodes semantics.

Paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don’t give you information; they give you information shaped sentences.

They don’t encode semantics. They encode the statistical likelihood that each token will follow a given sequence of tokens.

It’s worth pointing out that it does happen to reconstruct information remarkably well considering it’s just likelihood. They’re pretty useful tools like any other, it’s funny ofc to watch silicon valley stumble all over each other chasing the next smartphone.

“remarkably well” as long as the remark is “this is still garbage!”