Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than answers

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by teiferer on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @06:27AM (#50364118)

I don't think that's a suitable mental model of how LLMs work. Their output is not just the statistical average of all the training data. If it was then the output would be quite useless.

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Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by Loquebantur on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:20AM (#50364579)

An LLM trained on the entire internet incorporates essentially all (human-known) aspects of things.

Like a superposition of all kinds of writing styles, all perspectives on every topic and all kinds of ways to do things right and wrong.

In post-training (and of course already by sensibly curating the input data in the first place), people try to select useful submanifolds from that.

Ideally, you get a combination of all the extant strengths of people combined into one model. Self-improvement then leaves the sphere of human capability for good.

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