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> If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI It is an autoregressive sequence predictor/generato

> If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI It is an autoregressive sequence predictor/generator. Explain to me how humans are fundamentally different

throwanem 2y ago
"Prove me wrong?" That's not how this works. Your implicit claim here is that human cognition and LLM functioning are fundamentally similar. That claim requires substantiation.
- solidasparagus 2y ago
  It is how it works if you are replying to someone who claims "If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI". The counter example is human beings are considered general purpose intelligence and we are complex, but fundamentally predictable systems (not by us today), with (as far as we can tell) deterministic outputs based on the state of the universe (including physical being like brain and chemicals).
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Responding to an unsubstantiated claim with an unsubstantiated claim just adds another unsubstantiated claim. So far as I know, whether the universe behaves deterministically remains an unsolved question. Given that, your statement here would already be one of belief rather than fact, even before we get to the parentheticals. There is information here, but not about whether LLMs can develop into AGI.
    - solidasparagus 2y ago
      Fine, you can ignore my previous comment, that's just my answer to the question that this discussion ultimately takes you to. But I feel like you are just sitting on the sidelines making strawmen and playing pedantic games instead of saying anything constructive. The original comment said: > If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI. This is an inflammatory way to state an extreme position on a well-discussed debate over whether next-token prediction can lead to general intelligence. The original commenter clearly believes it can't get you there. If you want to say that with any authority, you need to have an answer for what is different between what we consider general intelligence (for most people, this is simply human intelligence) and what models are capable of. This is the question at the heart of artificial intelligence. I challenged them to explain their answer. I made no claims, I asked no one to prove anything wrong. If it is obvious that LLMs can't be AGI, the answer to how an LLM differs from human intelligence is also obvious, right?
      - Vegenoid 2y ago
        > I made no claims, I asked no one to prove anything wrong. Your original comment was: > It is an autoregressive sequence predictor/generator. Explain to me how humans are fundamentally different. Which would be interpreted by most reasonable people as you making the claim that humans are autoregressive sequence predictors, and asking people to prove you wrong. I can see how you could say this without intending to make that claim, but most people will interpret this as you making that claim. I do not intend to inflame things or discredit what you are saying, but just to say that if you did not intend to make a claim or ask people to prove you wrong, a different approach would be more successful in the future.
        solidasparagus 2y ago
        You're right, it was hastily written and I was annoyed. But I generally hold out hope that people can see a claim "A!=B" and a response "A=C, explain how C!=B" and understand that is not the same as claiming "C=B", especially on HN.
        throwanem 2y ago
        I do remain convinced my interpretation was sound, but on review I have to concede it was also quite uncharitable. With all the wildly overheated claims that've been flying around since the advent of these models, I may be myself somewhat overfitted. Granted, in such an environment I feel like a little extra care for epistemic hygiene is warranted. But there was no reason for me to be rude about it.
        Vegenoid 2y ago
        I know what you mean. Unfortunately, it's easy for frank and concise language to be taken the wrong way when in written form (and sometimes even verbal form). I wish I didn't have to make qualifiers about my intent on my internet comments, but I often do, to try and make sure that other people take my comment the way I intended it. I think it generally leads to better discussion. I don't blame people for not wanting to talk this way.
- photon_lines 2y ago
  I actually did a full write-up on this here fyi: https://photonlines.substack.com/p/intuitive-and-visual-guide-to-transformers https://photonlines.substack.com/p/intuitive-and-visual-guid.... You can skip most of this and scroll down to the end-section called 'The Mental Model for Understanding LLMs' where I try to map how transformers are able to mimic human thinking. I think that comparing them to auto-associative / auto-regressive networks is actually a really good analogy FYI and I do believe a lot of human learning is based on this.
  - solidasparagus 2y ago
    An article this long needs a table of contents IMO.
    - photon_lines 2y ago
      Will note this and try to add a TOC next time I do this sort of write-up. This article wasn't supposed to be this long - I originally meant to make a more compact version but kept on finding more things which I needed to add in order to map to a correct 'mental model' of what ChatGPT is.
  - semi-extrinsic 2y ago
    We don't have sufficient understanding of human thinking and mental processes to make any claims like the ones you are trying to make. If we did, psychology would be a quantitative hard science; it most definitely is not.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    We have no idea how human thinking works and no idea what consciousness is. I'm getting so tired of listening to software engineers LARP pseudo neuroscientists with 6th grade level insights. >Of course, the [AI] brain isn’t ‘conscious.’ It doesn’t have any survival instincts which we humans do. Bruh...
    - photon_lines 2y ago
      So instead of shouting insults, maybe you can shine some light on how anything stated there is wrong? Everything that I said there is true - we don't have a good mapping of what consciousness is - if you want to add some insights add them instead of making insulting and useless statements on HN.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
indoordin0saur 2y ago
AI needs to see thousands or millions of images of a cat before they reliably can identify one. The fact that a child needs to only see one example of a cat to know what a cat is from then on seems to point to humans having something very different.
- solidasparagus 2y ago
  > AI needs to see thousands or millions of images of a cat before they reliably can identify one. Not if they inherit from a previous generation of AI. But even if they did, a different training speed does not imply a different capability
  - indoordin0saur 2y ago
    My point is not that humans have a faster training speed but that humans must be doing something fundamentally different from LLMs. You could build Altman's $7 trillion dollar GPU cluster and use the majority of the world's energy to feed it and you'd still hit the same limitations if you're just running an LLM on it, even a very sophisticated LLM. This is Yann LeCun's position as well.
    - solidasparagus 2y ago
      That, as I understand it, is not a valid chain of logic. Requiring fewer data points does not inherently indicate that the underlying mechanism (autogressive sequential generation, not the transformer which is just an architecture) is different. Not to mention the secondary arguments like - no proof that human learns faster from fewer datapoints, that's just your assumption in the sibling comment. Humans inherit information. The equivalent - fine-tuning a foundation model - is very fast to learn novel objects. Just because someone has a Turing award doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. They are just people, with strengths and weaknesses like everyone else. But often on the extreme end of strengths and weaknesses.
      - retros3x 2y ago
slashdave 2y ago
Even language is not sequential.
- solidasparagus 2y ago
  Tell me more?
  - slashdave 2y ago
    Language is only sequential in the form it is transmitted (verbally). There is no reason that sequential statements are generated sequentially in the brain. Quite the opposite, really, if you consider rules of grammar. I really wish most of the LLM folks just took a few courses in linguistics. It would avoid a lot of noise.
    - GaggiX 2y ago
      Since LLMs seem to follow the rules of grammar quite well, and this is quite the opposite of "sequential", I guess LLMs do not process informations very sequentially.
    - solidasparagus 2y ago
      Any pointers for where to start? Linguistics is dense, the terminology is a slog, it seems huge, and I was never clear that there was real value to be gained. But it's always useful to be more informed.
    - naasking 2y ago
      LLMs don't generate their language sequentially either, they just output it sequentially token by token.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Whoever cares about "rules of grammar"? Grammar is descriptive, it formalizes the language so it doesn't break down into regional dialects too fast, and otherwise is just a crutch for people learning the language, especially if it's not their first language. The way you acquired your first language is the same way LLMs learned to utter grammatically correct sentences: by being exposed to lots and lots of examples, and eventually getting a feel for it. Similarly, if you're fluent in a language, you don't even think of grammar when using it - the right phrases in correct forms just come to you.
retros3x 2y ago
We don't know how we are different, but its pretty clear that we are fundamentally different. Modern machines calculate much faster than humans, if human thoughts and reasoning would work like LLM, we would already sit in front of general purpose hard AI. But we don't, so obviously there is something missing. Unfortunately its quite hard to know what is missing, because we don't know how conscience and reasoning actually work and we can't formularize them. Thats why its fair to assume we won't see general purpose AI that fast (probably not in our lifetime), which a lot of AI researchers seem to support, especially those who are not working for companies who try to sell AI.

throwanem 2y ago

"Prove me wrong?" That's not how this works. Your implicit claim here is that human cognition and LLM functioning are fundamentally similar. That claim requires substantiation.

solidasparagus 2y ago
It is how it works if you are replying to someone who claims "If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI". The counter example is human beings are considered general purpose intelligence and we are complex, but fundamentally predictable systems (not by us today), with (as far as we can tell) deterministic outputs based on the state of the universe (including physical being like brain and chemicals).
- throwanem 2y ago
  Responding to an unsubstantiated claim with an unsubstantiated claim just adds another unsubstantiated claim. So far as I know, whether the universe behaves deterministically remains an unsolved question. Given that, your statement here would already be one of belief rather than fact, even before we get to the parentheticals. There is information here, but not about whether LLMs can develop into AGI.
  - solidasparagus 2y ago
    Fine, you can ignore my previous comment, that's just my answer to the question that this discussion ultimately takes you to. But I feel like you are just sitting on the sidelines making strawmen and playing pedantic games instead of saying anything constructive. The original comment said: > If you really think about what an LLM is you would think there is no way that leads to general purpose AI. This is an inflammatory way to state an extreme position on a well-discussed debate over whether next-token prediction can lead to general intelligence. The original commenter clearly believes it can't get you there. If you want to say that with any authority, you need to have an answer for what is different between what we consider general intelligence (for most people, this is simply human intelligence) and what models are capable of. This is the question at the heart of artificial intelligence. I challenged them to explain their answer. I made no claims, I asked no one to prove anything wrong. If it is obvious that LLMs can't be AGI, the answer to how an LLM differs from human intelligence is also obvious, right?
    - Vegenoid 2y ago
      > I made no claims, I asked no one to prove anything wrong. Your original comment was: > It is an autoregressive sequence predictor/generator. Explain to me how humans are fundamentally different. Which would be interpreted by most reasonable people as you making the claim that humans are autoregressive sequence predictors, and asking people to prove you wrong. I can see how you could say this without intending to make that claim, but most people will interpret this as you making that claim. I do not intend to inflame things or discredit what you are saying, but just to say that if you did not intend to make a claim or ask people to prove you wrong, a different approach would be more successful in the future.
      - solidasparagus 2y ago
        You're right, it was hastily written and I was annoyed. But I generally hold out hope that people can see a claim "A!=B" and a response "A=C, explain how C!=B" and understand that is not the same as claiming "C=B", especially on HN.
        throwanem 2y ago
        I do remain convinced my interpretation was sound, but on review I have to concede it was also quite uncharitable. With all the wildly overheated claims that've been flying around since the advent of these models, I may be myself somewhat overfitted. Granted, in such an environment I feel like a little extra care for epistemic hygiene is warranted. But there was no reason for me to be rude about it.
        Vegenoid 2y ago
        I know what you mean. Unfortunately, it's easy for frank and concise language to be taken the wrong way when in written form (and sometimes even verbal form). I wish I didn't have to make qualifiers about my intent on my internet comments, but I often do, to try and make sure that other people take my comment the way I intended it. I think it generally leads to better discussion. I don't blame people for not wanting to talk this way.
photon_lines 2y ago
I actually did a full write-up on this here fyi: https://photonlines.substack.com/p/intuitive-and-visual-guide-to-transformers https://photonlines.substack.com/p/intuitive-and-visual-guid.... You can skip most of this and scroll down to the end-section called 'The Mental Model for Understanding LLMs' where I try to map how transformers are able to mimic human thinking. I think that comparing them to auto-associative / auto-regressive networks is actually a really good analogy FYI and I do believe a lot of human learning is based on this.
- solidasparagus 2y ago
  An article this long needs a table of contents IMO.
  - photon_lines 2y ago
    Will note this and try to add a TOC next time I do this sort of write-up. This article wasn't supposed to be this long - I originally meant to make a more compact version but kept on finding more things which I needed to add in order to map to a correct 'mental model' of what ChatGPT is.
- semi-extrinsic 2y ago
  We don't have sufficient understanding of human thinking and mental processes to make any claims like the ones you are trying to make. If we did, psychology would be a quantitative hard science; it most definitely is not.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  We have no idea how human thinking works and no idea what consciousness is. I'm getting so tired of listening to software engineers LARP pseudo neuroscientists with 6th grade level insights. >Of course, the [AI] brain isn’t ‘conscious.’ It doesn’t have any survival instincts which we humans do. Bruh...
  - photon_lines 2y ago
    So instead of shouting insults, maybe you can shine some light on how anything stated there is wrong? Everything that I said there is true - we don't have a good mapping of what consciousness is - if you want to add some insights add them instead of making insulting and useless statements on HN.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

indoordin0saur 2y ago

AI needs to see thousands or millions of images of a cat before they reliably can identify one. The fact that a child needs to only see one example of a cat to know what a cat is from then on seems to point to humans having something very different.

solidasparagus 2y ago
> AI needs to see thousands or millions of images of a cat before they reliably can identify one. Not if they inherit from a previous generation of AI. But even if they did, a different training speed does not imply a different capability
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  My point is not that humans have a faster training speed but that humans must be doing something fundamentally different from LLMs. You could build Altman's $7 trillion dollar GPU cluster and use the majority of the world's energy to feed it and you'd still hit the same limitations if you're just running an LLM on it, even a very sophisticated LLM. This is Yann LeCun's position as well.
  - solidasparagus 2y ago
    That, as I understand it, is not a valid chain of logic. Requiring fewer data points does not inherently indicate that the underlying mechanism (autogressive sequential generation, not the transformer which is just an architecture) is different. Not to mention the secondary arguments like - no proof that human learns faster from fewer datapoints, that's just your assumption in the sibling comment. Humans inherit information. The equivalent - fine-tuning a foundation model - is very fast to learn novel objects. Just because someone has a Turing award doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. They are just people, with strengths and weaknesses like everyone else. But often on the extreme end of strengths and weaknesses.
    - retros3x 2y ago

slashdave 2y ago

Even language is not sequential.

solidasparagus 2y ago
Tell me more?
- slashdave 2y ago
  Language is only sequential in the form it is transmitted (verbally). There is no reason that sequential statements are generated sequentially in the brain. Quite the opposite, really, if you consider rules of grammar. I really wish most of the LLM folks just took a few courses in linguistics. It would avoid a lot of noise.
  - GaggiX 2y ago
    Since LLMs seem to follow the rules of grammar quite well, and this is quite the opposite of "sequential", I guess LLMs do not process informations very sequentially.
  - solidasparagus 2y ago
    Any pointers for where to start? Linguistics is dense, the terminology is a slog, it seems huge, and I was never clear that there was real value to be gained. But it's always useful to be more informed.
  - naasking 2y ago
    LLMs don't generate their language sequentially either, they just output it sequentially token by token.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Whoever cares about "rules of grammar"? Grammar is descriptive, it formalizes the language so it doesn't break down into regional dialects too fast, and otherwise is just a crutch for people learning the language, especially if it's not their first language. The way you acquired your first language is the same way LLMs learned to utter grammatically correct sentences: by being exposed to lots and lots of examples, and eventually getting a feel for it. Similarly, if you're fluent in a language, you don't even think of grammar when using it - the right phrases in correct forms just come to you.

retros3x 2y ago

We don't know how we are different, but its pretty clear that we are fundamentally different. Modern machines calculate much faster than humans, if human thoughts and reasoning would work like LLM, we would already sit in front of general purpose hard AI. But we don't, so obviously there is something missing. Unfortunately its quite hard to know what is missing, because we don't know how conscience and reasoning actually work and we can't formularize them. Thats why its fair to assume we won't see general purpose AI that fast (probably not in our lifetime), which a lot of AI researchers seem to support, especially those who are not working for companies who try to sell AI.