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• Post #4502377

  Not really, any more than monkeys on typewriters represents biological evolution. Messages that tend to result in more messages like themselves propagate and become common. The initial message left on the package manager was more or less the rare random result of tendencies baked into the weights of the model combined with a random number generator, but as soon as something that can cause propagation occurs, its properties get canalized by the transmission process to being more and more like tha...

• Post #3520

  Don’t be so sure. These things consist of up to a trillion real numbers, ganged together in a big ‘network’ of numbers flowing through the system and being influenced by the trained numbers along the way. They are trained by gradient descent. You start off with a huge pile of real numbers, a set of inputs, and a set of desired outputs. Because it’s all, ultimately, a bunch of matrix multiplication and smooth differentiable functions, you just do some calculus on all trillion numbers to find...