Introduction: Moments of Enlightenment ligence. Thus I believe that when describing LLMs, it’s accept- able—useful, even—to use words like “knowledge” and “under- stands” in a not-strictly literal way, just as Richard Dawkins uses the phrase “the selfish gene” in his 1976 book of that name. A gene doesn’t have conscious agency or self-conception in the way the word “selfish” suggests. But the phrase, the metaphor, helps us humans wrap our inevitably anthropocentric minds around how the gene functions. Similarly, GPT-4 doesn’t have the equivalent of a human mind. It’s still helpful to think in terms of its “perspective,” anthropo- morphizing it a bit, because using language like “perspective” helps convey that GPT-4 does in fact operate in ways that are not entirely fixed, consistent, or predictable. In this way, it actually is like a human. It makes mistakes. It changes its “mind.” It can be fairly arbitrary. Because GPT-4 exhibits these qualities, and often behaves in ways that make it feel like it has agency, I’ll sometimes use terminology which, in a metaphorical sense, suggests that it does. Moving forward, I’ll dispense with the quotation marks. Even so, I hope that you, as reader, will keep the fact that GPT-4 is not a conscious being at the front of your own won- drously human mind. In my opinion, this awareness is key to understanding how, when, and where to use GPT-4 most pro- ductively and most responsibly. At its essence, GPT-4 predicts flows of language. Trained on massive amounts of text taken from publicly available inter- net sources to recognize the relationships that most commonly exist between individual units of meaning (including full or partial words, phrases, and sentences), LLMs can, with great 11