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Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English s
by shruggedatlas 6mo ago
Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoI get you're trying to do the whole "humans and LLMs are the same" bit, but it's just plainly false. Please stop.
- wil421 6mo agoIf you think this way then why not talk to LLMs exclusively. Don’t let the oxytocin cloud your ability to problem solve.
- JohnMakin 6mo agopeople like to say this like they’re apples to apples but this comparison isn’t remotely how the brain actually works - and even if it did, the brain does it automatically without direction and at an infitesimal percentage of the power required. And we’re just talking about cognition - it completely ignores the automatic processes such as maintaining and regulating the body and it’s hormones, coordinating and maintaining muscles, visual/spacial processing taking in massive amounts of data at a very fine scale, and informing the body what to do with it - could go on. One of the more annoying things about this conversation is you don’t even need to make this argument to make the point you’re trying to make, but people love doing it anyway. It needlessly reduces how amazing the human brain is to a bunch of catchy sci fi sounding idioms. It can be simultaneously true that transformer based language models can be very smart and that the human brain is also very smart. It genuinely confuses me why people need to make it an either/or.
- igggh 6mo agoGreat post
- ch_fr 6mo agoThank you, this comparison has been a huge annoyance of mine for the past 3 years of... this same debate over and over. I think it's the hubris that I find most offensive in this argument: a guy knows one complex thing (programming) and suddenly thinks he can make claims about neuroscience.
- stonyrubbish 6mo agoHuman cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many parenthesis are balanced here ((((()))))) (you can test this), it doesn't have any kind of genuine cognition.
- chpatrick 6mo agoThis is such a boring cliche by now. "thinking" and "knowing what it's doing" are totally vague statements that we barely understand about the human mind but in every comment section about AI people definitively state that LLMs don't do them, whatever they are.
- stonyrubbish 6mo agoThey aren't so vague that you would argue the parrot is thinking.
- chpatrick 6mo agoWhy not?
- davebren 6mo agoThis is the epitome of learned helplessness, that you need a neuroscience paper to tell you what thinking and knowledge is when you experience it directly all the time, and can't tell that an LLM doesn't have it. Something is extremely evil about these ideologies that are teaching people that they are NPCs.
- chpatrick 6mo agoI know I'm thinking, I have no idea if you're thinking, or if you're a human or an LLM. But I wouldn't assume you aren't thinking just from reading your output.