No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Disclaimer: I am honestly a layman in this field. I may get a bunch of stuff wrong, but am happy to learn from experts. Feel free to point mistakes out and destroy me in the replies.
This feels like an oversimplification. Unfortunately, I can't think of a good analogy without anthromorphosising LLMs.
IMO this anime scene works well enough as an analogy at a super high level: anime_irl
"Comprehending what other people is saying is one step" - encoder
"Thinking about how to answer is one more step" - working with the feature representation
"Putting the things that popped into my mind into words is another step" - decoder
By current LLMs, I am going to assume that you are not referring to the raw models, but platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc with UIs for you to interact with the underlying models.
There are fundamentally two different problems here: searching the web for answers, and putting the answers into words.
If I ask you: "What is the colour of fire engines?", I imagine you would answer "Red", sometimes "Yellow", off the top of your head.
What if I ask you "What are the 10 longest rivers in the world"? I believe you won't be able to give me an answer right away. What you can do is a web search, find the answer, then present the results to me. You can give it to me in 10 short bullets points, or you can come up with an essay with paragraphs describing each river.
You probably got my point by now, but to make it explicit: finding an answer and putting it into words are two different processes. They are independent of each other, so the final text output can be as long or as short as need be.
For these LLM platforms, when the model "doesn't know" the answer, they probably have a subroutine that searches the web, then feed the answer to the underlying model. The model then packages the search results into readable form - in words instead of vectors - to you.
Sorry but I can't think of a good answer to this at the moment; leaving it to others for now - unless I managed to think of something good.
Same for this question.
Hope the partial answer helps; tried my best to ELI5.