'Looking up a table doesn't make you a calculator': the LLM-essence debate

gerardsans · x · 2026-09-29

In an ongoing debate about the nature of LLM intelligence, gerardsans pushes back on the claim that a model is just its training data or sampler: just as a person using a lookup table instead of a calculator doesn't become a calculator, the sampler is not the data itself.

Related event: Debate Flares Over Whether LLMs Are Just Samplers Without Intelligence(2 posts)→

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