this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
300 points (98.7% liked)
Microblog Posts
78 readers
127 users here now
Shareworthy Microblogs.
- Always link to the original post.
- Only recent microblogs(Past 30 days/Month).
- Only text based microblogs, don't share microblogs that is based on photos or using mainly photos.
Blacklisted websites:
- X/Twitter.
- Tumblr.
founded 1 week ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Excel is fundamentally different to LLMs because it doesn't generate anything. It just calculates stuff in a table, every calculation is traceable and you can backtrack to the source of each input.
LLMs calculate the next most likely token based on what they were trained on and it's impossible to tell exactly where it got the info from. LLMs don't even know that themselves, you can ask for a source but 90% of the time they just generate a non-working link in return. It has to be that way or else LLMs could only reproduce tokens that were in their training set verbatim, like a giant database search engine.
The Excel function "flash fill" is an example of excel "guessing" the user intent and automatically creating output based on a few examples.
It is probably still "traceable", though.