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This made me think about a conversation I had recently with a friend who is a researcher in Natural Language Processing. Obviously what we now call LLMs have taken her field by storm, which now mostly consists of trying to understand how the fuck they work.

I mean, we know they work, and they work unreasonably well, but no one knows how, no one even knows why they work!

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Woah, I didn't realise NLP was still a field, but cool that they're working on interpretability now!

It still is, but at least in her case, she is doing "AI" now. It is still NLP, but it is easier to get funding if you call it AI.

That's a weird situation, LLMs are language models, the very core of NLP, and yet the field tends to be overlooked. And by the way, she doesn't like the term "LLM": a language model that is large? what kind of model? what is "large"?

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