Debatable I would argue. It's definitely not 'just a statistical model's and I would argue that the compression into this space fixes potential issues differently than just statistics.
But I'm not a mathematics expert if this is the real official definition I'm fine with it. But are you though?
its a statistical term, a latent variable is one that is either known to exist, or believed to exist, and then estimated.
consider estimating the position of an object from noisy readings. One presumes that position to exist in some sense, and then one can estimate it by combining multiple measurements, increasing positioning resolution.
its any variable that is postulated or known to exist, and for which you run some fitting procedure
I'm disappointed that you had to add the 'metamagical' to your question tbh
It doesn't matter if ai is in a hype cycle or not it doesn't change how a technology works.
Check out the yt videos from 1blue3brown he explains LLMs quite well.
.your first step is the word embedding this vector space represents the relationship between words. Father - grandfather. The vector which makes a father a grandfather is the same vector as mother to grandmother.
You the use these word vectors in the attention layer to create a n dimensional space aka latent space which basically reflects a 'world' the LLM walks through. This makes the 'magic' of LLMs.
Basically a form of compression by having higher dimensions reflecting kind a meaning.
Your brain does the same thing. It can't store pixels so when you go back to some childhood environment like your old room, you remember it in some efficient (brain efficient) way. Like the 'feeling' of it.
That's also the reason why an LLM is not just some statistical parrot.
So it would be able to produce the training data but with sufficient changes or added magic dust to be able to claim it as one's own.
Legally I think it works, but evidence in a court works differently than in science. It's the same word but don't let that confuse you and don't mix them both.
It's great business to minimally modify valuable stuff and then take credit for it. As was explained to me by bar-certified counsel "if you take a recipe and add, remove or change just one thing, it's now your recipe"
The new trend in this is asking Claude Code to create a software on some type, like a Browser or a DICOM viewer, and then publishing that it's managed to do this very expensive thing (but if you check source code, which is never published, it probably imports a lot of open source dependencies that actually do the thing)
Now this is especially useful in business, but it seems that some people are repurposing this for proving math theorems. The Terence Tao effort which later checks for previous material is great! But the fact that the Section 2 (for such cases) is filled to the brim, and section 1 is mostly documented failed attempts (except for 1 proof, congratulations to the authors), mostly confirms my hypothesis, claiming that the model has guards that prevent it is a deus ex machina cope against the evidence.
The model doesn't know what its training data is, nor does it know what sequences of tokens appeared verbatim in there, so this kind of thing doesn't work.
It's not the searching that's infeasible. Efficient algorithms for massive scale full text search are available.
The infeasibility is searching for the (unknown) set of translations that the LLM would put that data through. Even if you posit only basic symbolic LUT mappings in the weights (it's not), there's no good way to enumerate them anyway. The model might as well be a learned hash function that maintains semantic identity while utterly eradicating literal symbolic equivalence.
