Both The Algorithm and LLMs are ultimately powered by human decisions.
- Both The Algorithm and LLMs are ultimately powered by human decisions.
- The Algorithm here meaning any ranking function that relies on human interaction to rank an infinite feed.
- The Algorithm, pre LLMs, creates an emergently intelligent ranking better than any individual human could do.
- It does that by extracting the consistent bias in massive amounts of noisy signal flowing through it; the cacophonous actions and decisions of a wide swath of humanity.
- But it requires a constant flow of these human decisions to continue working.
- LLMs also work by capturing the power of decisions of wide swathes of humanity.
- But it works retroactively by looking at the things that humans cared enough to write down and share in the past.
- It creates a hologram of that background human motivation that can then be queried forever into the future without humans in the loop.