It’s actually more like if you kept taking everyone’s hand, drawing an outline around it on paper, all sharing the same paper… ignore the fact that the paper will get filled in after enough samples. In theory, you’ll eventually have an outline which has every human hand factored in. You may call it whatever you want; it’s basically a super robust model of hands.

Now imagine that you can interact with the drawing. You can “pull out” a hand, any hand of your choosing. In fact, it doesn’t even need to have come from the same hand because it’s all measured using the same intersecting graphite lines. The model is so vast, full of hands, that it can generalize the patterns which make hands. So you can “pull out” a short-fingered fat-palmed hand, even if all sampled hands either had fat-palms or short-fingers.

Our hand model isn’t a compression of all hands.

Its more like if you were mining for gold… you’ve got to rinse out all the dirt from the mined substrate. In the case of our hand model, “dirt” is anything which isn’t mathmatically necessary for a hand. Maybe it’s the mistakes which occurred during tracing, or a boil on someone’s thumb… all of that gets blurred out by the much grander similarities from the totality of the sampled set. It’s those similarities in particular which we want to isolate. Call it the “formula of the hand,” determined via the most rigorous way one could: collecting every single simularity from every single example, isolating those simularities, then using the result as a function.

AI models do this with our language.