{"paper":{"title":"How Large Language Models (LLMs) Extrapolate: From Guided Missiles to Guided Prompts","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CL"],"primary_cat":"cs.CY","authors_text":"Xuenan Cao","submitted_at":"2024-12-05T19:54:47Z","abstract_excerpt":"This paper argues that we should perceive LLMs as machines of extrapolation. Extrapolation is a statistical function for predicting the next value in a series. Extrapolation contributes to both GPT successes and controversies surrounding its hallucination. The term hallucination implies a malfunction, yet this paper contends that it in fact indicates the chatbot efficiency in extrapolation, albeit an excess of it. This article bears a historical dimension: it traces extrapolation to the nascent years of cybernetics. In 1941, when Norbert Wiener transitioned from missile science to communicatio"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2501.10361","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2501.10361/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}