this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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The problem is: Data is code, and code is data. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is equivalent to a list of prime numbers, (also, not relevant to this discussion, homoiconicity and interpretation). Yet we still want to make a distinction.
Is a PAQ-compressed copy of the Hitchhiker's guide code? Technically, yes, practically, no, because the code is just a fancy representation of data (PAQ is basically an exercise in finding algorithms that produce particular data to save space). Is a sorting algorithm code? Most definitely, it can't even spit out data without being given an equally-sized amount of data. On that scale, from code to code representing data, AI models are at least 3/4th towards code representing data.
As such I'd say that AI models are data in the same sense that holograms (these ones) are photographs. Do they represent a particular image? No, but they represent a related, indexable, set of images. What they definitely aren't is rendering pipelines. Or, and that's a whole another possible line of argument: Requiring Turing-complete interpretation.
I think it comes down to how it's used.
An LLM model is nothing unless it's used to process some other things. It does something. It predicts the likeliness of words following a sequence of other words. It has no other purpose. It can't take the model, analyse it in a different way and extract different conclusions. It is singular in function. It is a program.
Data has no function. It is just data.