Wednesday, June 18, 2025

We Put our Faith in Llama4

I know there are a lot of people out there putting a lot of faith in not only Blast Hardcheese but also the large language models of artificial intelligence. But the more I look at what these LLMs produce, the more I want to pat them on the back and say:

Miracle Max: "Have fun stormin' the castle!"

Valerie: "Do you think it'll woik?"

Miracle Max: "It'll take a miracle."

[Both] "Byeeeee!"

To a certain audience of humans, what I've written here has two obvious references, first to The Princess Bride, and next to the MST3K version of Space Mutiny.

But to any LLM, the context of these references is absolutely alien. An LLM could comment on what I've written, but without the context I and some readers have in this situation, the response will be more nonsensical than anything else.

And this is what inspired this post:




Maybe I'm being unfair to LLMs. This could just be Meta cluelessness. But I suspect all LLMs are built on the same technology and are probably just as clueless as Llama4.

I'm sure there are a *lot* of references to "miracle pills" and "chocolate coatings" on the internet for these LLMs to scrape and study. Some of them might even be from The Princess Bride. But since the LLMs only know how to put words together based on the models it has in its database, it has no idea which of the references are pertinent in context. Maybe they'll get better at that over time, but it's going to be through human tweaking, not through anything the LLMs do themselves.

I suspect, however, there's enough context here to at least help Llama4 narrow the possibilities down.

The message was posted by the Cinema Shorthand Society. So the LLM could at least consdier the context of cinema. That certainly would narrow down the possibilities.

That and the fact miracles pills AND a chocolate coating are mentioned. Even with that context, someone unfamiliar with the film could do a good boolean search on Google (miracle pill AND chocolate coating), find The Princess Bride, and deduce it's the correct context, based on the poster.

Until then, it's back to the fo'cas'le of the Pequod. Which brings in possible references from Moby Dick and The Simpsons to name only two. Only my audience knows which is the most pertinent context.

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