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Comment by blueblimp | Hacker News Reader

> If it understands language at all, an LLM only does so in a statistical, rather than a grammatical, way. It is much more like an abacus than it is like a mind.

This analogy puzzled me. An abacus does not strike me as statistical in the way it functions. And minds do seem to be statistical, as far as I know.

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I would posit that no one knows what a mind even is, which makes direct analogy problematic. The experience of having mind is a self-reinforcing construct, because it's biologically favorable to have a narrative, so that "fact" of self-experience isn't very objective. Whatever is experienced by an artificial system is going to be utterly, completely alien - and we don't have too much better of an idea of the complex dynamics inside the largest models, although the best scientists are working as fast as they can. The science of emergence is still extremely new, with many unexpected applications, new ones cropping up constantly.

This moment is really interesting because it reveals how much claims about AI are fundamentally bottlenecked by neuroscience. There's a lot of conjecture right now about which analogies between biological intelligence and AI hold, which don't, and what tests might prove or disprove true intelligence.

Most of these arguments tend to find their dead end at the level of, "Well, we don't really know enough about the human brain to say whether that's true."

An LLM is still a deterministic machine, which why it is the same as an Abacus.

AI today is built using classical computers but the human mind is a quantum computer. AI is a simulation of a quantum computing device built using a classical computing device. The simulation might provide some insight into how the real thing works but the underlying mechanism is completely different.

Any physical object is comprised of electrons, among other things, meaning it interacts with quantum mechanics on some level. That does not mean quantum mechanics are fundamental to the abstracted idea of how the human brain works.

People are so fond of the idea of saying consciousness and quantum mechanics are both weird so they must be the same thing.

What evidence suggests our brain is leveraging quantum computing?

https://phys.org/news/2022-10-brains-quantum.html

Please do provide a citation for the deterministic nature of LLMs. (They provide probability distributions for the next word. They are not deterministic)

They are deterministic in the sense that you get the same output given the same input. We interpret their output as a probability distribution over words. But we can do this because we intentionally normalize the word scores.

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