Plato Cave is about Epistemology itself, not specifically about LLMs. Funny that GPT connected those two things, I wonder what the prompt was...
Plato said that we cannot fully understand the substance of the world itself, because we're using only 5 senses, and measuring/experiencing/analysing the world using them is like being held in a cave as a prisoner, chained to the wall facing it, noticing people moving outside only by the shadows they cast on the wall. It's about the projection that we are only able to experience.
I only added “Explain the reference to Plato’s Cave below:\n\n” before the copy pasted parent comment
What comes to mind is how language itself is merely a projection of human knowledge? experience? culture? social group? and trying to reverse engineer any kind of ground truth from language alone (like an LLM trying to “reason” through complex problems it’s not explicitly taught) is like trying to derive truth from the shadows while locked in the cave? maybe we just need more/higher fidelity shadows :)
If you consider the whole of the problem, a portion is due to fundamental and unavoidable shortcomings of the language, and the rest is unskilled/normative usage of language.
Which set is bigger? I'd bet my money on the latter.
Complicating matters: you have to consider usage for both the sender and the receiver(s) (who then go on to spread "the" message to others).
I would say LLM has nothing with knowledge and Plato's Cave. LLM is The Great Gambler who was looking at the earth for a long time (but o ly through internet and for some reason repositories) and he excels in gambling, i.e. putting his/hers/its money on the most probable things to come up after the words someone spoke
Plato said that we cannot fully understand the substance of the world itself, because we're using only 5 senses, and measuring/experiencing/analysing the world using them is like being held in a cave as a prisoner, chained to the wall facing it, noticing people moving outside only by the shadows they cast on the wall. It's about the projection that we are only able to experience.