The problem is where this is going, if you look down the road.

This should be a post on its own in some appropriate communities. Completely agree with you.

Thank you for the feedback! I've asked because at first I thought of sharing this satire piece which I found very funny. But suddenly wondered if that would have been OK or not – don't want to ruin what the users expect by subscribing to this community.

Number 2 above should absolutely be heeded much, much more!

I agree on your general point, but it also means that they produce OEM drivers that only work with a specific OS version. If you update, then you're on your own regarding those drivers. This is the case for instance for some touchpad/trackpoint or battery custom drivers available for Ubuntu 20.04 on an X1 Carbon, but not later Ubuntu versions.

No idea how to read the paper's title. Once upon a time there were things called prepositions, like "of", "for", "with", "on"... Probably now they're too modern-writer reduced cell-activity difficult.

Just wanted to applaud the fact that you've come here asking people, rather than asking some large language model.

I'd like to add one more layer to this great explanation.

Usually, this kind of predictions should be made in two steps:

1. calculate the conditional probability of the next word (given the data), for all possible candidate words;

2. choose one word among these candidates.

The choice in step 2. should be determined, in principle, by two factors: (a) the probability of a candidate, and (b) also a cost or gain for making the wrong or right choice if that candidate is chosen. There's a trade-off between these two factors. For example, a candidate might have low probability, but also be a safe choice, in the sense that if it's the wrong choice no big problems arise – so it's the best choice. Or a candidate might have high probability, but terrible consequences if it were the wrong choice – so it's better to discard it in favour of something less likely but also less risky.

This is all common sense! but it's at the foundation of the theory behind this (Decision Theory).

The proper calculation of steps 1. and 2. together, according to fundamental rules (probability calculus & decision theory) would be enormously expensive. So expensive that something like chatGPT would be impossible: we'd have to wait for centuries (just a guess: could be decades or millennia) to train it, and then to get an answer. This is why Large Language Models do two approximations, which obviously can have serious drawbacks:

• they use extremely simplified cost/gain figures – in fact, from what I gather, the researchers don't have any clear idea of what they are;

• they directly combine the simplified cost/gain figures with probabilities;

• They search for the candidate with the highest gain+probability combination, but stopping as soon as they find a relatively high one – at the risk of missing the one that was actually the real maximum.

(Sorry if this comment has a lecturing tone – it's not meant to. But I think that the theory behind these algorithms can actually be explained in very common-sense term, without too much technobabble, as @TheChurn's comment showed.)

Cheers, didn't know about this possibility!

Great community! Sorry must go – peeing myself after seeing the first posts there 🤣

Absolutely fair point and warning. In the end we all need to earn money somewhere in order to live. I think the real greyscale distinction is not between "corporate" vs "community", but on whether there's some actor that can act whimsically while remaining unchecked. I believe that the two terms are being used in an oversimplified way in that sense.

Thank you for the clarification! – And for the extra info about snaps, which was something else I was wondering about too (I use Kubuntu at the moment)!