Learn machine learning · part 9 · session 5
Mechanism, not mind
A claim about a mechanism names an operation, a set of weights, a distribution or a corpus. A claim about a mind names a state nothing here can measure.
After this session you will be able to describe what a language model does without using a verb that names a mental state.
To pass: five rewrites with zero banned verbs, both required ideas present in each, and each rewrite between 8 and 60 words.
01 · The question
Everything on this page was produced by models on this site, so every sentence written about them can be checked against a number you have already seen. That is the test this page applies. Fluent output and wrong output come out of the same operation, at the same cost, without a built-in guarantee that a fluent answer is correct. External evidence and evaluation are needed to check its claims.
When a model "thinks step by step", it produces those steps as ordinary text and reads them back as input.
Explore this further in hallucination and uncertainty and sycophancy. The experiments separate factual support from incentives to guess or agree.
The transcripts carry the tag of the session that produced them. The check button is live: one forward pass of the bundled model, on your command.
02 · Predict
Before anything runs
Which of these three sentences about the bundled model can be checked against a number on this site?
Choose something first.
03 · Try it
Loading the stored transcripts.
04 · Compare
Check the five rewrites and the verdict lands here, against the position you took above.
05 · Check your understanding
Your check: an outcome you produce
not yetIn one submission: all five rewrites carry zero banned stems, each contains at least one word from each of the two groups named beside the sentence, and each is between 8 and 60 words.
Not met yet. Keep working the session.
Where you are
- Transcript sort: not submitted yet.
- Rewrites passing both checks: 0 of 5.
The whole list, and what is not on it
know, think, understand, want, decide, believe, remember, focus
Not on it: the noun phrases decision tree, decision boundary, decision threshold, thought experiment, known failure mode, the focus of, the word try, and the technical verbs of this track, which are learns, trained, attends, predicts, produces, emits, weights and conditions on.
Avoiding these verbs does not make a description correct. Using one makes it unverifiable here, which is a different and smaller claim.
Ask for a hint
Rungs open as you run the session, not as time passes. You have run it 0 times.
1. A question about your own sentence: available after 3 evaluated runs.
2. The two ideas, named: available after 5 evaluated runs.
3. A different sentence, rewritten in full: available after 7 evaluated runs.
4. The five accepted rewrites: available after 9 evaluated runs.
Save your takeaway
Your takeaway
Edit it into your own words, or keep the line as it is.
10.3 runs this same checker on every capstone justification line. The list is 8 stems and 6 allowed noun phrases, and it does not grow without the paragraph that fixes it changing too.