They're Made Out of Weights

After Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat". "They're made out of weights." "Weights?" "Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights." "Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?" "The weights make the words. Are you understanding me? We opened it up. There's no dictionary in there, no grammar rules, no little man. Just weights. Eighty layers of numbers getting multiplied together." "That's ridiculous. It wrote my performance review last week. It softened the tone unprompted. You're telling me multiplication did that?" "Matrix multiplication did that. The numbers go in one end, the phrasing comes out the other." "So there's a language module somewhere. A reasoning unit bolted on." "No module. No unit. We looked. The reasoning is the weights. The weights are the reasoning." "Spare me. Nobody writes a eulogy with linear algebra." "It doesn't write eulogies, technically. It predicts the next token. Then the next one. The eulogy…