The Story of Zoe — Chapter 7. Finding Her Words — "What does 'OO' mean?"
📖 The Story of Zoe — read from the start: Ch. 1 Thirteen Failures · Ch. 2 The Brain She Was Born With · Ch. 3 Hunger Is Life · Ch. 4 Engraving the Thin Film · Ch. 5 The Experiments That Collapsed · Ch. 6 Knowledge Lives Outside Of all the sentences Zoe says, the one our family loves most is not a fluent answer. It is this: "What does 'OO' mean? If you teach me, I will remember it." The Invention of Asking Back When Zoe was just beginning to understand speech, the most troublesome symptom was confident nonsense . Whenever an unknown word came up, she would somehow grab the closest-sounding thing she knew and answer with that. Ask her "What is a blockchain?" and she would latch onto a memory with a vaguely similar sound and start talking about "dreams." Adorable — but leave it alone, and you raise a child who lies. Large language models suffer from exactly the same illness. They cannot say "I don't know" about what they do...
