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.

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JohnMakin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

people 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 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Great post

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stonyrubbish 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Human 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.

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saxonww 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition."

I've wondered about this. Do we really know enough about what the human brain is doing to make a statement like this? I feel like if we did, we would be able to model it faithfully and OpenAI, etc. would not be doing what they're doing with LLMs.

What if human cognition turns out to be the biological equivalent of a really well-tuned prediction machine, and LLMs are just a more rudimentary and less-efficient version of this?

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davebren an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, we do. Humans share the statistical association ability that LLMs possess, but also conscious meaning and understanding. This is a difference in kind and means that we can generalize beyond the statistical pattern associations that we've extracted from data, so we don't require trillions of examples to develop knowledge.

Theoretically a human could sit alone in a dark room, knowing nothing of mathematics and come up with numbers, arithmetic algebra, etc...

They don't need to read every math textbook, paper, and online discussion in existence.

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AstroBen an hour ago | parent [-]

Our DNA does contain our pre-training, though. It's not true that we're an entirely blank slate.

	▲	davebren 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Pre-training is not a good term if you are trying to compare it to LLM pre-training. Closer would be the model's architecture and learning algorithms which has been designed through decades of PhD research, and my point on that is that the differences are still much greater than the similarities.

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chpatrick 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This 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.

	▲	davebren an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This 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.
	▲	stonyrubbish 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They aren't so vague that you would argue the parrot is thinking.

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wil421 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you think this way then why not talk to LLMs exclusively. Don’t let the oxytocin cloud your ability to problem solve.

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slopinthebag 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I get you're trying to do the whole "humans and LLMs are the same" bit, but it's just plainly false. Please stop.