One hundred million maps
I took an intro cog sci class in school, and during a philosophy section, we got into some verbal conundrums. If you sit on a table every day for a year, is it a CHAIR? If you shoot at a window, and there’s a moment where the bullet has gone through but the cracks have barely started to form, is the window BROKEN?
I don’t even remember what conclusions they wanted us to draw, but my takeaway was that there is no gotcha here, it’s just that the map is not the territory. Our words are great and convey a lot, but they’re orders of magnitude less complex than the physical reality we exist in. Clearly there will be some points where they don’t match perfectly.
Large language models are shaped from a hundred million maps, but have never been in a single territory.