LLMs find patterns not from experience but from the residue of human experience: writing.

· Bits and Bobs 3/30/26
  • LLMs find patterns not from experience but from the residue of human experience: writing.
    • Real experience is rich and multi-dimensional.
    • The distilled residue is collapsed, 100x less fidelity.
    • So LLMs need 100x more writing to get the same depth of understanding of an experience.
      • Similar to "a picture is worth a thousand words."
    • But LLMs can detect patterns, even extraordinarily subtle ones, given enough data.
      • AlphaFold shows that this is not some party trick; they really are cluing into deep, low-frequency patterns that are outside a human mind's ability to perceive.
    • An LLM probably could describe the vibe of "whimsy" better than a human could, for example.

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