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There is no magic in the brain. There is no magic in LLMs. There is just new experience we gain by interacting with the environment and society. And there is th

There is no magic in the brain. There is no magic in LLMs. There is just new experience we gain by interacting with the environment and society. And there is the trove of past experience encoded in our books. We got smart by collecting experience, in other words, from outside. The magic in the brain was not in the brain, but everywhere else. What is experience? We are in state S, and take action A, and observe feedback R. The environment is the teacher, giving us reward signals. We can only increase our knowledge incrementally, by trying our many bad ideas, and sometimes paying with our lives. But we still leave morsels of newly acquired experience for future generations. We are experience machines, both individually and socially. And intelligence is the distilled experience of the past, encoded in concepts, methods and knowledge. Intelligence is a collective process. None of us could reach our current level without language and society. Human language is in a way smarter than humans.

crowbahr 3y ago
To say there's no magic in the brain drastically *minimizes the complexity of the brain. Your brain is several orders of magnitude more complex than even the largest LLM. GPT4 has 1 trillion parameters? Big deal. Your brain has 1 quadrillion synapses, constantly shifting. Beyond that the synapses are analog messages, not binary. Each synapse is approximately like 1000 transistors based on the granularity of messaging it can send and receive. It is temporally complex as well as structurally complex, well beyond anything we've ever made. I'm strongly in favor of AGI, for what it's worth, but LLMs aren't even scratching the surface. They're nowhere close to a human. They're a mediocre pastiche and it's equally possible that they're a dead end as it is that they'll ever be AGI.
- visarga 3y ago
  That kind of explains why humans need to absorb less language to train. It still takes 25 years of focused study to become capable of pushing the frontier of knowledge a tiny bit.
- gnaritas99 3y ago
  [dead]
- tomduncalf 3y ago
  Re: synapses being analog messages, isn’t this sort of true of neural networks? In my understanding, the weights, biases and values flowing through the network are floating point numbers so I’d argue closer to analog than binary.
  - crowbahr 3y ago
    You know that's a good point that I didn't consider in my comment. LLMs use 16bit floats, which is approximately the same number of values. But then you get into the nuance of spiking vs non spiking neurons etc, which to my knowledge isn't emulated. The brain is extremely complex. I don't believe LLMs do anything similar to inhibitor neuronal function for example.
elktown 3y ago
> There is no magic in the brain. The amount of hubris we have in our field is deeply embarrassing. Imagine a neuroscientists reading that. The thought makes me blush.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  Neuroscientists would agree with GP, otherwise they would be neuromystics instead of neuroscientists. There is no magic. It's all physical processes that we can eventually understand.
  - elktown 3y ago
    The entire point was that we do not understand it? That much of how the brain work is "magic" atm. It's our field that are the alchemist mystics, rambling about AGI/Philosopher's Stone in ever increasingly unhinged ways, while stirring our ML-pots that we have never even tried to prove have a chance to be anymore successful than the alchemists.
    - lern_too_spel 3y ago
      Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it's magic. That's the whole point of science. > It's _our field_ that are the alchemist mystics, rambling about AGI/Philosopher's Stone in ever increasingly unhinged ways, These "ramblings" are what scientists call hypotheses. The people making these hypotheses have even proposed how to test them.
      - elktown 3y ago
        Even with added quotes you can't stop reading it literally? The total lack of critical thinking due to confirmation bias is just as embarrassing.
        lern_too_spel 3y ago
        Visarga used the word literally and stated in broad strokes what the brain does (process input, update state, emit outputs) without the details of how it does so. You're the one who misinterpreted that as meaning we already know exactly how the brain works.
RaftPeople 3y ago
> There is no magic in the brain. Consciousness?

crowbahr 3y ago

To say there's no magic in the brain drastically *minimizes the complexity of the brain. Your brain is several orders of magnitude more complex than even the largest LLM. GPT4 has 1 trillion parameters? Big deal. Your brain has 1 quadrillion synapses, constantly shifting. Beyond that the synapses are analog messages, not binary. Each synapse is approximately like 1000 transistors based on the granularity of messaging it can send and receive. It is temporally complex as well as structurally complex, well beyond anything we've ever made. I'm strongly in favor of AGI, for what it's worth, but LLMs aren't even scratching the surface. They're nowhere close to a human. They're a mediocre pastiche and it's equally possible that they're a dead end as it is that they'll ever be AGI.

visarga 3y ago
That kind of explains why humans need to absorb less language to train. It still takes 25 years of focused study to become capable of pushing the frontier of knowledge a tiny bit.
gnaritas99 3y ago
[dead]
tomduncalf 3y ago
Re: synapses being analog messages, isn’t this sort of true of neural networks? In my understanding, the weights, biases and values flowing through the network are floating point numbers so I’d argue closer to analog than binary.
- crowbahr 3y ago
  You know that's a good point that I didn't consider in my comment. LLMs use 16bit floats, which is approximately the same number of values. But then you get into the nuance of spiking vs non spiking neurons etc, which to my knowledge isn't emulated. The brain is extremely complex. I don't believe LLMs do anything similar to inhibitor neuronal function for example.

elktown 3y ago

> There is no magic in the brain. The amount of hubris we have in our field is deeply embarrassing. Imagine a neuroscientists reading that. The thought makes me blush.

lern_too_spel 3y ago
Neuroscientists would agree with GP, otherwise they would be neuromystics instead of neuroscientists. There is no magic. It's all physical processes that we can eventually understand.
- elktown 3y ago
  The entire point was that we do not understand it? That much of how the brain work is "magic" atm. It's our field that are the alchemist mystics, rambling about AGI/Philosopher's Stone in ever increasingly unhinged ways, while stirring our ML-pots that we have never even tried to prove have a chance to be anymore successful than the alchemists.
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean it's magic. That's the whole point of science. > It's _our field_ that are the alchemist mystics, rambling about AGI/Philosopher's Stone in ever increasingly unhinged ways, These "ramblings" are what scientists call hypotheses. The people making these hypotheses have even proposed how to test them.
    - elktown 3y ago
      Even with added quotes you can't stop reading it literally? The total lack of critical thinking due to confirmation bias is just as embarrassing.
      - lern_too_spel 3y ago
        Visarga used the word literally and stated in broad strokes what the brain does (process input, update state, emit outputs) without the details of how it does so. You're the one who misinterpreted that as meaning we already know exactly how the brain works.

RaftPeople 3y ago

> There is no magic in the brain. Consciousness?