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Thank you for this - the name neural networks has made a whole generation of people forget that they have an endocrine system. We know things like sleep, hunge
by TRDRVR 3y ago
Thank you for this - the name neural networks has made a whole generation of people forget that they have an endocrine system.
We know things like sleep, hunger, fear, and stress all impact how we think, yet people want to still build this mental model that synapses are just dot products that either reach an activation threshold or don't.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __loam 3y agoPeople will spout off about how machine learning is based on the brain while having no idea how the brain works.
- gary_0 3y agoIt is based on the brain, but only in the loosest possible terms; ML is a cargo cult of biology. It's kind of surprising that it works at all.
- Borg3 3y agoIt works because well, its actually pretty primitive at its core. Whole learning process is actually pretty brutal. Doing millions of interations w/ random (and semi-random) adjustments.
- Terr_ 3y agoI think I've fallen into the "it's just a very fancy kind of lossy compression" camp.
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoHonestly once you understand maximum-likelihood estimation, empirical risk minimization, automatic differentiation, and stochastic gradient descent, it's not that much of a surprise it works.
- cosmojg 3y agoFortunately for academics looking for a new start in industry, this widespread misunderstanding has made it only far too easy to transition from a slow-paced career in computational neuroscience to an overwhelmingly lucrative one in machine learning!
- goatlover 3y agoThere have been people on HN arguing that the human brain is a biological LLM, because they can't think of any other way it could work, as if we evolved to generate the next token, instead of fitness as organisms in the real world. Where things like eating, sleeping, shelter, avoiding danger, social bonds, reproduction and child rearing are important. Things that require a body.
- kungito 3y agoI'm one of those people. To me those things only sounded like a different prompt. Priorities set for the llm
- TRDRVR 3y agoHere's the hubris of thinking that way: I would imagine the baseline assumption of your thinking is that things like sleep and emotions are a 'bug' in terms of cognition (or at the very least, 'prompts' that are optional). Said differently, the assumption is that with the right engineer, you could reach human-parity cognition with a model that doesn't sleep or feel emotions (after all what's the point of an LLM if it gets tired and doesn't want to answer your questions sometimes? Or even worse knowingly deceives you because it is mad at you or prejudiced against you). The problem with that assumption is that as far as we can tell, every being with even the slightest amount of cognition sleeps in some form and has something akin to emotional states. As far as we can prove, sleep and emotions are necessary preconditions to cognition. A worldview where the 'good' parts of the brain (reasoning and logic) are replicated in LLM but the 'bad' parts (sleep, hunger, emotions, etc.) are not is likely an incomplete model.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoDo airplanes need sleep because they fly like birds who also require sleep?
- goatlover 3y agoBirds flap their wings and maneuver differently. They don't fly the same way.