Comment by sixdimensional

This brings a whole new meaning to "memoizing", if we just let the LLM be a function.

In fact, this thought has been percolating in the back of my mind but I don't know how to process it:

If LLMs were perfectly deterministic - e.g. for the same input we get the same output - and we actually started memoizing results for input sets by materializing them - what would that start to resemble?

I feel as though such a thing might start to resemble the source information the model was trained on. The fact that the model compresses all the possibilities into a limited space is exactly what makes it more valuable - instead of having to store every input, function body and outputs by memoizing that an LLM could generate, it just stores the model.

But this blows my mind somehow because if we DID store all the "working" pathways, what would that knowledgebase effectively represent and how would intellectual property work anymore in that case?

Thinking about functional programming, to me the potential to think of the LLM as the "anything" function, where a deterministic seed and input always produces the same output, with a knowledgebase of pregenererated outputs to use to speed up the retrieval of acceptable results for a given seed and set of inputs.... I can't put my finger on it.. is it a basically just a search engine then?

Let me try another way...

If I have a ask an LLM to generate a function for "what color is the fruit @fruit?", where fruit is the variable, and I memoize that @fruit = banana + seed 3 is "yellow", then the set of the prompt, input "@fruit", seed = 3, output = "yellow"... then this is now a fact that I could just memoize.

Would that be faster to retrieve the memoized result than calculating the result via the LLM?

And, what do we do with the thought that that set of information is "always true" with regards to intellectual property?

I honestly don't know yet.