It has a general objective of next-token prediction for which modeling characters is a useful strategy. IMO it’s plausible that the human brain is “trained” on prediction to a large extent, for which modeling characters is also a useful strategy.
Sure. By “not explicitly pre-trained” I just mean to say that there’s nothing ‘special’ about the characters from the training algorithm’s point of view, so in this respect they’re not so different from a hypothetical general predictive algorithm in humans(although actually I guess the human brain attaches special salience to other people, but regardless...)
It has a general objective of next-token prediction for which modeling characters is a useful strategy. IMO it’s plausible that the human brain is “trained” on prediction to a large extent, for which modeling characters is also a useful strategy.
Maybe you meant to say they aren’t pre-trained to *model* characters? I still think they are literally trained to predict?
Sure. By “not explicitly pre-trained” I just mean to say that there’s nothing ‘special’ about the characters from the training algorithm’s point of view, so in this respect they’re not so different from a hypothetical general predictive algorithm in humans(although actually I guess the human brain attaches special salience to other people, but regardless...)