Comment by hliyan

In early 2023, I remember someone breathlessly explaining that there are signs that LLMs that are seemingly good at chess/checkers moves may have a rudimentary model of the board within them, somehow magically encoded into the model weights through the training. I was stupid enough to briefly entertain the possibility until I actually bothered to develop a high level understanding of the transformer architecture. It's surprising how much mysticism this field seems to attract. Perhaps it being a non-deterministic, linguistically invoked black box, triggers the same internal impulses that draw some people to magic and spellcasting.