Robert McNees in Elk: "My students are often surprised to le..."

My students are often surprised to learn that LLMs aren’t answering their questions. Rather, an LLM answers the question “what would a reply to this look like?” It’s one of the first things I explain in the “Should I use LLMs?” portion of my syllabus.

September 9, 2025 at 4:54:47 AM

Ivory for iOS

Thanks for sharing.
Sums up how LLM is designed and the discrepancy to the marketing.

but isnt that the same with (some) Humans ?

Exactly.

@torstentorsten @ulli so... whats the difference?

Who can tell? (Certainly not me)

But how would YOU spot and tell the difference between a reply and an uttering that looks like a reply?

can't.

What feels scary is that chatgpt can do lots of math 80% of the time very accurate. Mostly with help of creating its own python code and letting it run.

I find that alone very crazy

Replying to someone

@ulli @mcnees The problem is people tend to trust LLM answers uncritically. Not usually so with most human responses.

(Well, with the exception of current american politics…)

@reiterator @mcnees people vote Trump exactly because of that.