On: Tracing the thoughts of a large language model

[wuliwong]

Bad analogy, an LLM can output a block of text all at once and it wouldn't impact the user's ability to understand it. If people spoke all the words in a sentence at the same time, it would not be decipherable. Even writing doesn't yield a good analogy, a human writing physically has to write one letter at a time. An LLM does not have that limitation.

[sdwr → wuliwong]

The point I'm trying to make is that "each word following the last" is a limitation of the medium, not the speaker.

Language expects/requires words in order. Both people and LLMs produce that.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, people are perfectly capable of doing multiple things simultaneously as well, using:

- interrupts to handle task-switching (simulated multitasking)

- independent subconscious actions (real multitasking)

- superpositions of multiple goals (??)