LLMs Are Time Machines That Don’t Tell You How Far You Went

An LLM takes present-you, the version with a question, and hands back future-you, the version with a decision.

That is the trick, and it is a real one. Go back far enough, and answering a serious question meant a library. You looked up books, read them, took notes, found references inside those books that sent you to other books, and after some number of days you knew enough to decide. Search…