Re:Aliens: Explaining LLMs and AI agents to my children
by onetokenatatime on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @09:17AM
(#48920419)
Fair! I really hope kids don't think any of what's happening is magic. I tried to design against it: the alien is just a next-token predictor, has no memory, and can't do anything without the robot. It's painstakingly trained by the scientists. So I was hoping to frame it as a multi-part scientific endeavour rather than magic.
They named it like this due they follow a marketing that personify the names of the methods, to make people believe they are dealing with a different technology, including the named 'thinking' methods that simply query twice to increase the index of the next query, and so on.
I think introducing aliens and robots will make children believe it is magic, like if intelligent entities or a thinking were behind the answers/procedures, and that such "answers" are smarter than them or even their parents, when in reality, it is a marketing personified model joining statistical characters(bits) from the text with created such a vectorial database with loses, and guaranteed errors presence, with joins like a pachinko machine.