We are much more than weights which output probable next tokens.

You are a fool if you think otherwise. Are we conscious beings? Who knows, but we’re more than a neural network outputting tokens.

Firstly, and most obviously, we aren’t LLMs, for Pete’s sake.

There are parts of our brains which are understood (kinda) and there are parts which aren’t. Some parts are neural networks, yes. Are all? I don’t know, but the training humans get is coupled with the pain and embarrassment of mistakes, the ability to learn while training (since we never stop training, really), and our own desires to reach our own goals for our own reasons.

I’m not spiritual in any way, and I view all living beings as biological machines, so don’t assume that I am coming from some “higher purpose” point of view.

That is a silly point. We very clearly are not "a series of weights for probable next tokens", as we can reason based on prior data points. LLMs cannot.

We very obviously are not just a series of weights for probable next tokens. Like seriously, you can even ask an LLM and it will tell you our brains work differently to it, and that’s not even including the possibility that we have a soul or any other spiritual substrait.

The difference makes the necessary barriers different.

There's benefit to letting a human make and learn from (minor) mistakes. There is no such benefit accrued from the LLM because it is structurally unable to.

There's the potential of malice, not just mistakes, from the human. If you carefully control the LLMs context there is no such potential for the LLM because it restarts from the same non-malicious state every context window.

There's the potential of information leakage through the human, because they retain their memories when they go home at night, and when they quit and go to another job. You can carefully control the outputs of the LLM so there is simply no mechanism for information to leak.

If a human is convinced to betray the company, you can punish the human, for whatever that's worth (I think quite a lot in some peoples opinion, not sure I agree). There is simply no way to punish an LLM - it isn't even clear what that would mean punishing. The weights file? The GPU that ran the weights file?

And on the "controls" front (but unrelated to the above note about memory) LLMs are fundamentally only able to manipulate whatever computers you hook them up to, while people are agents in a physical world and able to go physically do all sorts of things without your assistance. The nature of the necessary controls end up being fundamentally different.

And the memento guy had tattoos of key information. That didn’t make it so he didn’t have memory loss.

Which it will start ignoring after two or three messages in the session.

and you'll blow the context over time and send to the LLM sanitorium. It doesn't fit like the human brain can.

If a junior fucks production that will have extroadinary weight because it appreciates the severity, the social shame and they will have nightmares about it. If you write some negative prompt to "not destroy production" then you also need to define some sort of non-existing watertight memory weighting system and specify it in great detail. Otherwise the LLM will treat that command only as important as the last negative prompt you typed in or ignore it when it conflicts with a more recent command.

Yup, and the agent will happily ignore any and all markdown files, and will say "oops, it was in the memory, will not do it again", and will do it again.

Humans actually learn. And if they don't, they are fired.

That's not learning.