Technology

It’s not code. It’s a matrix of associative conditions. And, specifically, it’s not a fixed set of associations but a sort of n-dimensional surface of probabilities. Your prompt is a starting vector that intersects that n-dimensional surface with a complex path which can then be altered by the data it intersects. It’s like trying to predict or undo the rainbow of colors created by an oil film on water, but in thousands or millions of directions more in complexity.

The complexity isn’t in understanding it, it’s in the inherent randomness of association. Because the “code” can interact and change based on this quasi-randomness (essentially random for a large enough learned library) there is no 1:1 output to input. It’s been trained somewhat how humans learn. You can take two humans with the same base level of knowledge and get two slightly different answers to identical questions. In fact, for most humans, you’ll never get exactly the same answer to anything from a single human more than simplest of questions. Now realize that this fake human has been trained not just on Rembrandt and Banksy, Jane Austin and Isaac Asimov, but PoopyButtLice on 4chan and the Daily Record and you can see how it’s not possible to wrangle some sort of input:output logic as if it were “code”.

Yes, the trained model is too complex to understand. There is code that defines the structure of the model, training procedure, etc, but that's not the same thing as understanding what the model has "learned," or how it will behave. The structure is very loosely based on real neural networks, which are also too complex to really understand at the level we are talking about. These ANNs are just smaller, with only billions of connections. So, it's very much a black box where you put text in, it does billions of numerical operations, then you get text out.