{"id":229510,"date":"2026-01-21T13:13:44","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T19:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/meet-the-new-biologists-treating-llms-like-aliens"},"modified":"2026-01-21T13:13:44","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T19:13:44","slug":"meet-the-new-biologists-treating-llms-like-aliens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/meet-the-new-biologists-treating-llms-like-aliens","title":{"rendered":"Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens"},"content":{"rendered":"

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How large is a large language model? Think about it this way.<\/p>\n

In the center of San Francisco there\u2019s a hill called Twin Peaks from which you can view nearly the entire city. Picture all of it\u2014every block and intersection, every neighborhood and park, as far as you can see\u2014covered in sheets of paper. Now picture that paper filled with numbers.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one way to visualize a large language model, or at least a medium-size one: Printed out in 14-point type, a 200-\u00adbillion-parameter model, such as GPT4o (released by OpenAI in 2024), could fill 46 square miles of paper\u2014roughly enough to cover San Francisco. The largest models would cover the city of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

We now coexist with machines so vast and so complicated that nobody quite understands what they are, how they work, or what they can really do\u2014not even the people who help build them. \u201cYou can never really fully grasp it in a human brain,\u201d says Dan Mossing, a research scientist at OpenAI.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a problem. Even though nobody fully understands how it works\u2014and thus exactly what its limitations might be\u2014hundreds of millions of people now use this technology every day. If nobody knows how or why models spit out what they do, it\u2019s hard to get a grip on their hallucinations or set up effective guardrails to keep them in check. It\u2019s hard to know when (and when not) to trust them.<\/p>\n

Whether you think the risks are existential\u2014as many of the researchers driven to understand this technology do\u2014or more mundane, such as the immediate danger that these models might push misinformation or seduce vulnerable people into harmful relationships, understanding how large language models work is more essential than ever.<\/p>\n

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Continue reading \u201cMeet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How large is a large language model? Think about it this way. In the center of San Francisco there\u2019s a hill called Twin Peaks from which you can view nearly the entire city. Picture all of it\u2014every block and intersection, every neighborhood and park, as far as you can see\u2014covered in sheets of paper. Now [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":701,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/701"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}