We still don’t really understand what large language models are

SILICON Valley’s feverish embrace of large language models (LLMs) shows no sign of letting up. Google is integrating its chatbot Bard into every one of its services, while OpenAI is imbuing its own offering, ChatGPT, with new senses, such as the ability to “see” and “speak”, envisaging a new kind of personal assistant. But deep mysteries remain about how these tools function: what is really going on behind their shiny interfaces, which tasks are they truly good at and how might they fail? Should we really be betting the house on technology with so many unknowns?

There are still large …