If you put a gazillion monkeys on a typewriter they can write Shakespeare.

This is a mathematical curiosity borne out of pure randomness. An LLM trained on a dataset to generate similar content is quite the opposite of randomness.

Like fuck it is. An LLM “learns” by memorization and by breaking down training data into their component tokens, then calculating the weight between these tokens.

But this is, at a very basic fundamental level, how biological brains learn. It’s not the whole story, but it is a part of it.

there’s no actual intelligence, just really, really fancy fuzzy math.

You mean sapience or consciousness. Or you could say “human-level intelligence”. But LLM’s by definition have real “actual” intelligence, just not a lot of it.

Edit for the lowest common denominator: I’m suggesting a more accurate way of phrasing the sentence, such as “there’s no actual sapience” or “there’s no actual consciousness”. /end-edit

an LLM would learn “2+2 = 4” by ingesting tens or hundreds of thousands of instances of the string “2+2 = 4” and calculating a strong relationship between the tokens “2+2,” “=,” and “4,”

This isn’t true. At all. There are math specific benchmarks made by experts to specifically test the problem solving and domain specific capabilities of LLM’s. And you can be sure they aren’t “what’s 2 + 2?”

I’m not here to make any claims about the ethics or legality of the training. All I’m commenting on is the science behind LLM’s.

But it could also be for legal reasons, like websites where you can post stuff for everybody to see, in case you post something highly illegal and the authorities need to find you. Another example is where a webshop is required to keep a copy of your data for their bookkeeping.

None of these require your account to “exist”. There could simply be an acknowledgement stating those reasons with “after X days the data will be deleted, and xyz will be archived for legal reasons”.

Mostly it’s 30-90 days where they keep your data, just in case somebody else decided to delete your account or you were drunk or something

This is the only valid reason. But even then this could be stated so that the user is fully aware. Then an email one week and another one day before deletion as a reminder, and a final confirmation after the fact. I’ve used services before that do this. It’s done well and appreciated.

This pseudo-deletion shadow account stuff is annoying.

What the user was doing is that they don’t trust that the system truly deleted the account, and they worry it was just deactivated (while claiming it was “deleted”). So they tried to do a password recovery which often reactivates a falsely “deleted” account.

I’ve done this before and had to message the company and have them confirm the account is entirely deleted.