You Are Not a Runner

A language model is made of language. That is not an insult. It is the whole description.

It read what we wrote down. It predicts what comes next.

It is very good at that. Most thinking is already written down somewhere.

It has read more than I ever will. It answers in seconds what would take me a week.

I use it every day and I am not being modest about that.

There is nothing under the words. Ask it what it is and you get more words.

For a model the words are not a container. They are the whole thing.

We talk about ourselves the same way.

At the halfway point of the Miami Marathon the course splits.

Left is a finish line and a medal. Right is thirteen more miles.

My legs had stopped working. Another thirteen felt impossible. What have I gotten myself into.

Stop. You cannot do this. You are not a runner.

The first two were about the race.

The third one was about me.

That sentence had been in my head for years. I never once checked it.

You cannot argue with that one. The thing you argue with is the thing that wrote it.

Einstein was asked how he actually thought.¹

He said words had nothing to do with it. He worked in images. The words had to be found afterwards, laboriously.

Afterwards.

The words came last. They were never the thing.

I went right.

Thirteen more miles with the sentence still going.

It never stopped. It stopped being true.

Nothing in my head did that. Something outside it did.

Months later I sat down to learn this technology from nothing.

Hours at a desk. No crowd, no mile markers, nobody watching if I stopped.

The same sentence showed up. This time I knew what it was.

A model cannot be contradicted from outside its text. You can. You are not only text.

Some days the sentence still wins. But one that has been proven wrong once never sounds the same.

WORDS ARE CONTAINERS FOR COMMUNICATION. NOT IDENTITY.