@FediThing @futurebird the metaphor I've used with my "non-technical" friends and family is that LLMs are basically like billions of Galton Boards that each have one hole for a marble on the input side and one output hole for every word and punctuation mark in every language.
Connected to each of the output holes is another Galton Board with it's input.
While it's a gross oversimplification that's ignoring context and attention, and is really better suited to explain a Markov Chain, so far it has helped me drive home the point that it's "just" stochastically picking the "most correct" word given a preceding word.
It's also useful to visualize why training is so expensive: You have to tune every peg of every Galton Board until the system behaves correctly.
