mgraczyk parent
LLMs, considered as a function of input and output, are not immutable at runtime. They create tokens that change the function when it is called again. That breaks most theoretical arguments
Sure. Another view is that an LLM is an immutable function from document-prefixes to next-token distributions.
But that view is wrong, the model outputs multiple tokens.
The right alternative view is that it's an immutable function from prefixes to a distribution over all possible sequences of tokens less than (context_len - prefix_len).
There are no mutable functions that cannot be viewed as immutable in a similar way. Human brains are an immutable function from input sense-data to the combination (brain adaptation, output actions). Here "brain adaptation" doing a lot of work, but so would be "1e18 output tokens". There is much more information contained within the latter