Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) “Hah judging by mentions overnight people seem to find the ghost analogy provocat” — TopicDigg

Hah judging by mentions overnight people seem to find the ghost analogy provocative. I swear I don't wake up just trying to come with new memes but to elaborate briefly why I thought it was a fun comparison: 1) It captures the idea that LLMs are purely digital artifacts that don't interact with the physical world (unlike animals, which are very embodied). 2) Ghosts are a kind of "echo" of the living, in this case a statistical distillation of humanity. 3) There is an air of mystery over both ghosts and LLMs, as in we don't fully understand what they are or how they work. 4) The process of training LLMs is a bit like summoning a ghost, i.e. a kind of elaborate computational ritual on a summoning platform of an exotic megastructure (GPU cluster). I've heard earlier references of LLM training as that of "summoning a demon" and it never sounded right because it implies and presupposes evil. Ghosts are a lot more neural entity just like LLMs, and may or may not be evil. For example, one of my favorite cartoons when I was a child was Casper the Friendly Ghost, clearly a friendly and wholesome entity. Same in Harry Potter, e.g. Nearly Headless Nick and such. 5) It is a nod to an earlier reference "ghost in the machine", in the context of Decartes' mind-body dualism, and of course later derived references, "Ghost in the shell" etc. As in the mind (ghost) that animates a body (machine). Probably a few other things in the embedding space. Among the ways the analogy isn't great is that while ghosts may or may not be evil, they are almost always spooky, which feels too unfair. But anyway, I like that while no analogy is perfect, they let you pull in structure laterally from one domain to another as as a way of generating entropy and reaching unique thoughts.