LLMs are orders of magnitude simpler than brains, and we literally designed them from scratch. Also, we have full control over their operation and we can trace every signal.

Are you surprised we understand them better than brains?

To be fair to your field, that advancement seems expected, no? We can do things to LLMs that we can't ethically or practically do to humans.

Oh I very much agree that it's great to see more research and findings and improvements in this field. I'm just a little puzzled by GP's tone (which suggested that it isn't completely expected to find new things about LLMs, a few years in).

Indeed. For me, it's also a good reminder that AI is here to stay as technology, that the hype and investment bubble don't actually matter (well, except to those that care about AI as investment vehicle, of which I'm not one). Even if all funding dried out today, even if all AI companies shut down tomorrow, and there are no more models being trained - we've barely begun exploring how to properly use the ones we have.

We have tons of low-hanging fruits across all fields of science and engineering to be picked, in form of different ways to apply and chain the models we have, different ways to interact with them, etc. - enough to fuel a good decade of continued progress in everything.

¸That field is called Machine Learning.

That is a very interesting thought!

Interestingly enough, for a while physics used to be studied by philosophers (and used to be put in the natural philosophy basket, together with biology and most other hard sciences).

The intersection of physics isnt psychology it is philosophy, and the same is true (at present) with LLM's

Much as Diogenes mocked Platos definition of a man with a plucked chicken, LLM's revealed what "real" ai would require: contigous learning. That isnt to diminish the power of LLM's (the are useful) but that limitation is a fairly hard one to over come if true AGI is your goal.

I hate to "umm, akshually" but apparently we have been studying the brain for thousands of years. I wasn't talking about purely modern neuroscience (which ironically for our topic of emergence, (often till recently/still in most places) treats the brain as the sum of its parts - be them neurons or neurotransmitters).

> The earliest reference to the brain occurs in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, written in the 17th century BC.

I was actually thinking of ancient greeks when writing my comment, but I suppose Egyptians have even older records than them.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_neuroscience

I came here to say this :)