I'm Done with LLM-through-Chat experience
SubscribeSign in
I'm Done with LLM-through-Chat experience<br>wake me up when it's all over
Nune Isabekyan<br>Jun 14, 2026
Share
This is going to be a philosophical one, and it’s going to be a rant again, so yeah, you’ve been warned I guess. Proceed at your own convenience.<br>I don’t know, how about you, but this AI hysteria gets me sometimes. While I understand “it’s just a tool”, and I preach the “don’t be affected by the hype”, I can’t help but wonder from time to time - “is intellectual work being replaced by AI?..”<br>And whoever says anything - this is emotional journey. I mean how many times in the history of humanity has the Pope addressed Tech?.. Even if it’s all meant to feed the hype, even if we’re all going to one day realize we were all doing things wrong, I sometimes can’t ignore were the whole world is going. Maybe I’m in my bubble, but it’s a pretty big bubble to ignore.<br>Anyways, I was trying to support a friend the other day who was feeling “down” because yet-another release of the AI agents seemed to take over a lot of the work again. My main argument was that language on it’s own, has never been a reliable way of communicating thoughts and ideas. So by that, it just can’t be that we build our businesses, our society, our work using something that is by definition - an unreliable way of communication.<br>...<br>Have you noticed how we always feel like we didn’t express ourselves as good as the thought we had? I think one part of becoming an author is coming to terms with living with the fact that expressing your ideas in a way you thought it is unattainable.<br>On top of the difference between our thought and what we said, think about this - words themselves do not carry meaning as much as they trigger an association. I take all of my history, the things I experienced, my internal perception of reality and I construct a signal out of it - words/sentences/tokens - I send them to the other person, and they interpret it based on their knowledge/perception/history.<br>It’s never exactly what you meant to say. We are always misunderstood. Because there was difference between what we “wanted” to say and actually “said” in the first place. And because the other side has their own vocabulary of interpretation.<br>So even if someone’s listening to you in the perfect focus - they are going to misunderstand you because the signal was incomplete in the first place.<br>There is always interpretation gap.<br>...<br>I seem to notice gaps nowadays. The gap between “Work as imagined” and “Work as done” (we discussed this with Adrian in my podcast). The gap between what I wanted to say and what I actually say. The gap between what I said, and what the other person understood.<br>You know Japanese have a whole art concept around it - “Ma” with a very beautiful hieroglyph 間 which actually consists of two parts - “Gate” (門) and “Sun”(日). Picture an image of light beaming through the empty space of a doorway...<br>according to Bernhard Karlgren, “A door through the crevice of which the moonshine peeps in”
the art of gaps. It’s not just “negative space” art. It’s related to the perception of a gap. It’s a place of possibilities and for me it’s recognition that the unsaid is where the other person does their half of the work.<br>Think of it, if our signal is “lossy channel”, yet the other person “gets” you, “understands” you, this means their internal structure(history/knowledge/perception of the world) is the most aligned with yours. So people who understand you best are not the ones who listen closely, they are the ones who’s internal structure is most aligned with yours.<br>So language, while being imperfect, is the tool that can reveal this the best. Otherwise we would have to compare notes for the last 37 years on the first date.<br>It brings out that fact that building more contracts on how to talk is not going to help you understand the person in front of you better. The best way to fully understand the person is to live through their experiences. The whole - “put yourself in my shoes” expression.<br>Although... a shared vocabulary doesn’t hand me your internal structure, true. But it gives us coordinates to triangulate it faster. So learning your partner’s language might be worth it 😃<br>So what I want to say, in case of humans, the gap is what makes the transfer worth happening. If we were of perfectly same structure, we’d already know everything ahead of time and we’d just sit in silence...
Now let’s think about LLMs
Language is never going to be a safe mechanism of sending and receiving information as we defined.<br>I think the obvious conclusion out of this is what a lot of researchers have been saying - unless we expose “AI” (LLMs, AGI - whatever) to the world, we won’t get them to “understand” anything. They’d stay token generators forever.<br>When we talk with LLMs now it does something to our brain. We expect it to have this lived knowledge, understanding that another human had. but it can’t. and you...