Last week I framed LLMs as dowsing rods.
- Last week I framed LLMs as dowsing rods.
- The more I think about it, the more I like that frame.
- A dowsing rod is a fuzzy kind of imprecise 'magic' that you should hold lightly.
- It's also principally animated by the intuition of the operator.
- Better intuition leads to better results.
- It's an object that distills and focuses that intuition into a convenient interactive package.
- For the LLM this "distilled intuition" works at two levels.
- 1) The intuition of the questioner to drive the LLM to useful insights.
- That is, the most important thing to get good answers with LLMs is to ask good questions.
- 2) The LLM itself is the distilled intuition of all of society into a cultural technology you can talk with.