JenniferplusplusFeb 26

I wrote about AI again. On some level I don't now why I do this to myself

https://jenniferplusplus.com/what-is-a-token/

Actually, I wrote most of it months ago, for work. But, it was well received, so I put it on my blog. This is the more generic version.

The short version is that AI is not magic. It's a real phenomenon with real behavior and tradeoffs. I'm deeply tired of *****ALL***** the tradeoffs being handwaved away. And so much imagination fills in for the actual behavior. So I tried to describe how it's built, because that informs how it works, which informs what it actually does. And to be clear, it does things. It's not useless. But that's not the same as being useful, or worthwhile.

Anyway, I already put ~4k words on this in the article, so I'll shut up and let it speak for itself.

What is a token

AI is meant to seem like magic. But there's no such thing as magic. It's all illusion. So, allow me to spoil that illusion for you.

Jennifer++
Show threadOliver Kohll

@jenniferplusplus Great post, I'm bookmarking.
My day job is to do with building organisations' databases that run their operations (ERP etc.) Back before LLMs but when neural nets, machine learning and 'deep learning' were coming into being, I dreamed of being to look for arbitrary correlations in multiple large datasets given open ended questions, stuff like e.g. 'did you know when you employed a new sales manager in Cardiff, sales of Welshcakes soared, but now stock control regularly runs out of raisins and that's impacted high profit margin sales of fruit & nut mix'.

People would look at me as if I was mad but I think the maths & tech. is probably there now to be able to do that sort of thing and maybe some bespoke enterprise systems are. But we seemed to have skipped over those opportunities generally, mindshare being fully taken up by *language* models.

Feb 26 at 6:19pmWeb