When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

Going back to the analogy, as you push on the plastic, your finger might squish slightly. A knife wouldn't squish (hopefully!)

There's a bit more to it with serrations/imperfections on the edge, and the motion of the blade, but they're mostly reapplying those ideas in slightly different ways!

From there, a knife is effectively just much more efficient at doing this, because:

1) The much finer edge reduces the amount of area that force is spread across

2) The much greater hardness means less of that force is wasted on deforming the blade

Your finger is forcing the chains of plastic molecules apart - or maybe breaking some of the chains themselves.

Breaking molecules themselves takes up a lot more energy than the force you're applying provide!

When you apply force to it, you strain the mechanical bonds in the material, and that force applies an amount of energy into the material.

This will then cause the material to deform & bend if it can, but if it can't (it's taut, or reaches the limit of how much it can deform), it will shear there

It might be useful to start from an analogy: think about how (or even go find some) you can press a finger through a taut layer of thin plastic wrapping

When you do, you're concentrating all of the force into your fingertip, which is smaller & ultimately harder than plastic

2/...

There are two key elements, I would say:
1) A knife focuses the force you're applying (so think Newton's Laws)
2) A knife cuts by being harder than what you're cutting (this builds on Hook's Law, and similar equations)

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