3 ms·

I agree, but apologists will say that that's all the human brain is doing, too. Myself, I think that's a terrible false analogy, and also have a higher bar for

I agree, but apologists will say that that's all the human brain is doing, too. Myself, I think that's a terrible false analogy, and also have a higher bar for anything to be called artificial "intelligence." These programs shouldn't be using personal pronouns or statements that imply cognition or esp reasoning. It's deceptive.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
I think nathan_compton is right in describing LLMs as "a single pass, feed forward, process calculating outputs from inputs". That is not all the human brain is doing. Human reasoning is not single pass - far from it. So I concur that the apologists are wrong about what the human brain is doing, and therefore wrong about the similarity to LLMs.
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  If an LLM gets extra passes, it can be smarter. This is especially important for eg. strict logic puzzles, where error correction is needed.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  My gut instinct / guess is that there's "stuff" in the brain that is a kind of system for doing the kind of thing that symbolic logic systems do: proposition management, unification, backtracking, etc. And I think this stuff is probably there from a very early age. Also, generally, while humans can be really bad at reasoning, when they're shown why they're wrong they're able to retrace their steps and fix -- assuming they're not emotionally attached to some outcome. I'm terrible at math, but if I slow down and have it explained, I'll get it (and then forget it.) LLMs... they don't work that way. Tell them how they're wrong or to explain how they got to some result... forget it, they can't retrace and fix.
  - Kim_Bruning 2y ago
    I posted several conversations with models in this thread. I did -in fact- manage to get them to retrace and fix where needed. GPT-4o was a lot of work. GPT-3 is fast but that was a long conversation catching all its errors (so not posted, but I can if you insist). 4 caught its error almost immediately. Claude-3.5 was on to us from the get-go and didn't need correcting.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

I think nathan_compton is right in describing LLMs as "a single pass, feed forward, process calculating outputs from inputs". That is not all the human brain is doing. Human reasoning is not single pass - far from it. So I concur that the apologists are wrong about what the human brain is doing, and therefore wrong about the similarity to LLMs.

Kim_Bruning 2y ago
If an LLM gets extra passes, it can be smarter. This is especially important for eg. strict logic puzzles, where error correction is needed.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
My gut instinct / guess is that there's "stuff" in the brain that is a kind of system for doing the kind of thing that symbolic logic systems do: proposition management, unification, backtracking, etc. And I think this stuff is probably there from a very early age. Also, generally, while humans can be really bad at reasoning, when they're shown why they're wrong they're able to retrace their steps and fix -- assuming they're not emotionally attached to some outcome. I'm terrible at math, but if I slow down and have it explained, I'll get it (and then forget it.) LLMs... they don't work that way. Tell them how they're wrong or to explain how they got to some result... forget it, they can't retrace and fix.
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  I posted several conversations with models in this thread. I did -in fact- manage to get them to retrace and fix where needed. GPT-4o was a lot of work. GPT-3 is fast but that was a long conversation catching all its errors (so not posted, but I can if you insist). 4 caught its error almost immediately. Claude-3.5 was on to us from the get-go and didn't need correcting.