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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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relatively robust colloquial understanding of these models.

This doesn't exist, at least on this forum on down. There's at least one person I talked to who really thought that LLMs were looking through the training data at inference time. It turns out that people using sloppy language ""colloquially"" ("joke's on you, I was only pretending to misunderstand LLMs") can cause people to believe the literal meaning if they don't know any better.

This is just not a relevant distinction when it comes to the human concept of memory.

Agreed.

I’ll keep pushing this because “actually, an LLM doesn’t have memory of the training set” isn’t really true.

This isn't what I said. I said it doesn't have access to the training set, in the same way that if you take an exam without "access" to the textbook you're not allowed to bring it in and leaf through it when answering the problems. It doesn't preclude you from reading the textbook a thousand times and memorizing it verbatim though.

I said it doesn't have access to the training set, in the same way that if you take an exam without "access" to the textbook you're not allowed to bring it in and leaf through it when answering the problems.

Again, if we change “it accesses the training set” to “it recalls / accesses / understands [delete as appropriate] the conceptual relationships represented by the training set” what really changes?

What changes is that one is completely wrong and the other is defensible. One leads you to think that an LLM recognizing Shakespeare (or a lesser author) from a sample of writing is an unremarkable feat, an information retrieval problem that's been solved for forty years. The other causes you to realize that what's going on here is much deeper.

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