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Fundamentally, the question is this: what is a large language model, what is it capable of, how does it differ from human cognition, and what can humans do that

Fundamentally, the question is this: what is a large language model, what is it capable of, how does it differ from human cognition, and what can humans do that it cannot do? A lot of people seem to believe that with more time and training, LLMs will surpass human intelligence. But they are fundamentally not like human intelligence. They do not reason, learn, conceptualize, think creatively or abstractly, even though we have some hacks to mimic these behaviors. I posit that treating LLMs like GPU-powered brains that will eventually surpass us in most fields is pure science fiction if you know anything about how they work. I think they will remain astronomically powerful in some areas (pertaining to fuzzy deep search and recombining existing knowledge) and hilariously bad in others.

sigmoid10 15d ago
>They do not reason, learn, conceptualize, think creatively or abstractly Since we lack a definition of all these things or a clear understanding of how they are realized in humans or LLMs, the only thing you can really claim is that LLMs do not look like biological neural networks when it comes to processing information at the fundamental level. Everything else is dogma. But since all this stuff clearly emerges as size of the network grows, we can not ignore the possibility that complexity itself is the only requirement, not architecture (hardware or software). At the most basic levels, we are also just machines that evolved to make more of themselves and learned to interact with the environment to achieve that goal more efficiently. Humans will certainly have to come to terms with the fact that we are not the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe, but that won't stop them from denying it.