What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either

A large language model is nothing more than a monumental pile of small numbers. It converts words into numbers, runs those numbers through a numerical pinball game, and turns the resulting numbers back into words. Similar piles are part of the furniture of everyday life. Meteorologists use them to predict the weather. Epidemiologists use them to predict the paths of diseases. Among regular people, they do not usually inspire intense feelings. But when these A.I. systems began to predict the path of a sentence—that is, to talk—the reaction was widespread delirium. As a cognitive scientist wrote recently, “For hurricanes or pandemics, this is as rigorous as science gets; for sequences of words, everyone seems to lose their mind.”