AI: The Stone Soup Analogy for LLMs
2025-02-28
This article uses the parable of 'Stone Soup' to cleverly illustrate the workings of Large Language Models (LLMs). In the story, travelers use a few stones and ingredients provided by villagers to cook a delicious soup. This is similar to how LLMs utilize a small number of algorithms and vast resources from the internet, human feedback, etc., to construct a seemingly 'intelligent' system. The author points out that LLMs are not independent intelligent agents, but rather cultural technologies like internet search engines. Their 'intelligence' stems from the contributions of collective human intelligence, not the magic of the algorithms themselves.