A concept that I think is really helpful for interpreting what an LLM does is the concept of a “Chinese room”. The idea is someone slips a piece of paper containing a message in Chinese under the door and inside that room is someone that doesn’t know Chinese following a set of rules for converting characters and numerals into a response based off their syntax. Afterwards the person in the room creates a response and slips it back out under the door. At no point does the person in the room understand the Chinese in the input or in the output, but the person standing outside of the room might believe there is a Chinese speaker inside of the room. This is the same idea with computerized outputs like LLMs. They only provide the illusion of intentionality and don’t actually have an understanding of inputs or their outputs.

And the added economic benefits of having in-house services are basically a return on investment that balance out any higher initial costs. It’s a no brainer.

NDP’s Wab Kinew as PM would be an amazing thing for the country. He seems like exactly what we’d need after Carney.

It’s a bridge owned by Canada that undercuts a US billionaire owned bridge. It’s a win in my book. And you know what’s worse for the environment? Continuing to feed a warmongering economy down south.