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The Honest Limits

  1. 01The Honest Limits
  2. 02Memory card
  3. 03Why it sounds so sure
  4. 04The training data is the world
  5. 05What these tools are bad at
  6. 06Take a breath
  7. 07Reinforce your understanding
  8. 08Question: When to trust
  9. 09Question: Whose world is in the training data?
  10. 10Quiz: answer
  11. 11Knowing the limits is using them well
  12. 12Want to go deeper?
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That was a run of hard truths, so let us gather them into one calm picture before the questions.

A language model is a brilliant pattern-completer with a fixed shape. It writes the most plausible-sounding continuation, which is often, but not always, true. It cannot feel its own uncertainty, so it sounds exactly as sure when it is wrong. Its knowledge leans toward whoever got written down the most, and it stops at the moment training ended. And there are specific things it is simply built badly for: exact counting, careful step-by-step logic, anything past its frozen edge.

None of this is a reason to distrust it across the board. It is a map of where to trust it. You are not learning that the tool is bad. You are learning its shape, so you know which jobs to hand it freely and which to hand it with one eye open.

That is the whole point of being honest about the limits: not to make you wary, but to make you accurate. The last few questions are a chance to make these ideas your own.

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