Re:GitHub Copilot is not infringing copyright
by nl on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @07:51PM
(#27755813)
Analogies start to break down once we are talking at this detailed level.
The best I can come up with is this:
Imagine you are implementing a system to give the correct answer to the addition of any two numbers between 1 and 100.
One way to implement it would be to build a large database, loaded with "x" and "y" and their sum. Then when you want to find out what 1 + 2 is you do a lookup.
The other method is to implement a "sum" function.
Both give the same results. The first process is a database lookup, the second is akin to a generative process because it's doing calculation to come up with correct result.
This analogy breaks down because a NN does have a token lookup as well. But the probabilistic computation is the major part of how a NN works, not the lookup part.
The best I can come up with is this:
Imagine you are implementing a system to give the correct answer to the addition of any two numbers between 1 and 100.
One way to implement it would be to build a large database, loaded with "x" and "y" and their sum. Then when you want to find out what 1 + 2 is you do a lookup.
The other method is to implement a "sum" function.
Both give the same results. The first process is a database lookup, the second is akin to a generative process because it's doing calculation to come up with correct result.
This analogy breaks down because a NN does have a token lookup as well. But the probabilistic computation is the major part of how a NN works, not the lookup part.