Terence Tao: The math behind today’s LLMs is actually simple. Training and running them mostly uses linear algebra, matrix multiplication, and a bit of calculus, material an undergraduate can handle. We understand how to build and operate these models.

The real mystery is why they work so well on some tasks and fail on others, and why we cannot predict that in advance. We lack good rules for forecasting performance across tasks, so progress is largely empirical.

A key reason is the nature of real-world data. Pure noise is well understood, perfectly structured data is well understood, but natural text sits in between, partly structured and partly random. Mathematics for that middle regime is thin, similar to how physics struggles at meso-scales between atoms and continua.

Because of this gap, we can describe the mechanisms but cannot yet explain capability jumps or give reliable task-level predictions. That mismatch, simple machinery versus hard-to-predict behavior, is the core puzzle.

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Video from Prof @Briankeating YT Channel (Link in comment)