Tribe fitting doesn't sound as far off from minimizing loss functions as you imply.
LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. They do not choose to obey the requirements of a loss function; it is simply how they work, like any machine. Humans do not work this way, and the difference is fundamental.
Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? I wouldn't think so. The loss function applies during training, that ultimately defines the weights which guide their "thinking process".
Analogously, human experiences in childhood shape our ultimate neural weights which guide our thinking processes in social situations in adulthood.
> LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think.
You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have.
Because the only thing an LLM does is apply statistics to inputs to generate outputs. That's literally it. It's just a pile of statistics.
To draw an analogy to humans requires that humans are similarly statistical. LLMs do not have cognitive processes, while humans do, so the analogy obviously requires making some kind of leap between the two if it is to have any merit whatsoever. My request lines up with this: if LLMs are "not so different" from humans, and if LLMs work only based on statistics, then this requires humans also work only based on statistics. I want to see evidence of this.
> You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have.
Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? And therefore we can't know how they work, so we get to just make up wild claims about their capabilities, and then smarmily position ourselves as some kind of authority on the matter when other people talk about how they work?
No, I don't think so. We do know how LLMs work, and the way they work is not thinking. They have no agency. Claims to the contrary are, frankly, absolutely absurd. They're just statistics. There's nothing magical about them. You should stop pretending there is.
No, he's suggesting that the code behind the human brain is "ineffable or something". For all we know, human brains might be "just statistics", "nothing magical about them".
You have no way of knowing that LLMs don't think, because we literally don't know what thinking is.
The only reason we assume that rocks don't think is because they don't appear to be able to do things that would require thinking. LLMs, on the other hand...
Except we do know enough to know that LLMs are not following the same processes as humans.
Or, at least, I know enough, and experts in the field that I talk to know enough. I suppose I can't speak for you.
In other words, "trust me, bro".
You claiming that you're an expert (or talk with experts, and therefore are something-like-an-expert) about something doesn't convince me of anything except that you're full of yourself. Any idiot (or LLM, for that matter) can write such a comment on the internet. Providing logical arguments and real information, however, would be much more effective at convincing me that LLMs cannot think.
But that would require you to actually be an expert, wouldn't it?
AI experts know nothing about neuroscience so I'm not sure what you think this proves. Ask any neuroscientist if we have a precise mathematical understanding of how the brain works. You accuse others of tiresome leaps of logic, but you seemingly don't realize that there is literally no evidence supporting your claims about the brain.
I suggest rereading my detailed argument above until the following sinks in: we have no mathematical understanding of folk-psychology concepts like 'thoughts' and 'feelings', therefore I cannot claim that LLMs or any other machine learning algorithm does not contain those mathematical objects.
Prove they are not.
> Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something?
No, the argument is quite simple. We understand the mathematics of transformers and LLMs, therefore they seem obvious and not at all magical.
By contrast, we do not understand the mathematics behind human cognition, therefore it seems complex and mysterious, and we have only non-rigourous folk concepts like "thoughts" and "feelings" to describe mental phenomena. Therefore you cannot intuitively fathom how to bridge the gap between mathematics and your folk concepts, and so any comparison seems absurd, but note that the absurdity is purely a product of our ignorance of the mathematics of mind. This is a classic god of the gaps fallacy.
Here's how you can logically bridge that gap from a different direction: per the Bekenstein Bound, any finite volume contains finite information; a human is a finite volume, therefore it contains finite information; any finite system can be described by a finite state machine; therefore a human can be described by a finite state machine, which is a mathematical model.
Therefore whatever a "thought" or "feeling" is, will correspond to some mathematical object. Now exactly what kinds of mathematical objects they are is unknown.
However, transformers learn to reproduce a function by learning how to map inputs to outputs. The function mapping inputs to outputs is the human brain's function for producing intelligible human text. Therefore, LLMs are at least partially learning the human brain's function for producing intelligible text.
Whether this requires "thoughts" and therefore LLMs fully or partly reproduces what we refer to as "thoughts" is not yet clear, but what is clear is that we have no basis to claim they have no thoughts, because we don't really know what thoughts are.
I already asked for a proof that they are. Asking for a negative proof in response demonstrates either an inability to justify the claim or a lack of desire to engage in good faith.
This stuff is so tiring. Y'all are really bent on misrepresenting things to convince people that LLMs either are capable of thought or else put us, like, only a couple steps away from programs that will be capable of thought. The AI Singularity is nigh!
But it's all bullshit. It's just pseudoscientific postulation and sufficiently obfuscated leaps in logic — and it works to dupe layfolk who don't know any better. It's irresponsible, reprehensible, and immoral. Go find someone else to sell your philosophical snake oil to.
Whomever is making a positive claim has the burden of proof. I'm not making a positive claim, therefore I need present no proof. You are claiming LLMs are not like the human brain, therefore you must show the proof.
All I've done so far is present evidence and arguments demonstrating that your claims are not as certain as you present them to be.
Split-brain personality people can make up stories when you prompted the other brain, and the current half has to explain why it did something.
I'm baffled also that reverse psychology even works on LLMs, to bypass some of its safeties. I mean.. We're using psychological tricks that work on toddlers and also work on these models.
I'm an amateur neuroscientist as you can see, but find LLMs fascinating.
That's a bold statement. Do you have evidence for this?
How does the financial industry work? How are people comfortable executing transactions?
Do you generally rely on your bank account to not randomly fluctuate in its balance without cause?
Do you work in the tech industry? Do you rely on computers and algorithms and software to do things humans promised they would do?
All of this requires a very high level of consistency either in humans or in tools they have created.
Because there are serious checks and balances? Because of double entry bookkeeping, reconciliation, audits and, ultimately, prisons? Systems of governance put into place with the explicit goal of ameliorating the vagueness of individual humans?
Maybe the ambiguity in this discussion is how to distinguish consistency from conformism?
According to NHTSA [0] there are about 2.1 accidents per million miles driven. This includes fatality, injury-only and property-damage-only accidents. That is the equivalent of over 99.999% of miles driven without an accident. Over 5 nines of reliably consistent behavior.
[0] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
That being said, GPT4 can just open its virtual mouth spew forth without reflection and still produce consistent text is clearly superhuman.
A human neural net is constantly bombarded with inputs from many different senses, which firstly, gets prioritized based on prior usefulness. That usefulness is updated all the time, constantly, and that's what any current AI implementation lacks.
1 - The continuous integration of data from all "senses". This one should be self-evident, as obviously, all our senses are constantly barraging our brain with data and it learns to handle that over time, in whichever way your genetic makeup + learned internal cognitive processes dictate it be handled.
2 - The network that decides which data requires which amount of attention, and whether to store it in short or long term memory. This is obviously tied in quite closely to 1, as you need massive amounts of data to understand underlying patterns, and which data is just spam, versus what's really valuable.
3 - And with these two things together come the emergence of improving of approximation of consistency. Which means, this itself is a metric which the agent running the other agents needs to be aware of. Its silly to think the human brain is a single agent. It makes way more sense to see it as various interacting agents that equate to a greater sum than its parts.
Now, that being said, I'm not an expert on AI or Data Science, but this is more or less how my understanding of computational theory of mind meets with biological computing and neural networks. My theory is that, the first actually intelligent AI will be one that is composed of a network that makes decisions on how to spend a unit of iteration. One iteration becomes "an instant" to the AI. Aka, the AI decides to spend one iteration thinking, or spawns a sub-agent (which it is aware will consume resources that other processes might also need access to, but it needs to be able to decide which action to pursue).
So in all honesty, its amazing to me that LLM's on their own have been able to achieve this level of "personhood" despite their being only a tiny subset of the whole that makes up a "conscious" entity.
Edit: Misunderstood parent's point.
You're arguing that recent AI developments are a big deal and I'm not arguing against that. But what anyone stating that needs to answer is why we should think that big deal is a good thing - since humans are using the technology and will control whom it benefits. We don't have a good track record there, historically, which is another are in which we are, sadly, consistent.
Also any strategy that you might came up and is simple enough for you to follow is trivially followable for chatGPT as well.
Having done phone support in early parts of my career, I'd strongly dispute any notion that most humans can be consistent if we try for anything more than the shortest periods and following the very simplest of instructions.
Most people are really awful at maintaining the level of focus needed to be consistent, and it's one of the reasons we spend so much time drilling people on specific behaviours until they're it's near automatic instead of e.g. teaching people the rules of arithmetic, or driving, or any other skills and expecting people to be able to consistently follow the rules they've learnt. And most of us still keep making mistakes while doing things we've practised over and over and over.
LLMs are still bad at being consistent, sure, but I've seen nothing to suggest that is anything inherent.
I think one of the biggest issues with LLMs if anything is that they've gotten too good at expressing themselves well, so we overestimate the reasoning levels we should expect from them in other areas. E.g. we're not used to an eloquent answer from someone unable to maintain coherent focus and step by step reasoning because human children don't learn to speak like this before we're also able to reason fairly well, and that makes it confusing to deal with LLMs where relative stage of development of different skills does not match what we expect.
Isn’t that what scammers, catfishers, con artists, and marketers do?
If it all really is nurture rather than nature we're much more fragile than people may realize and only ever one generation away from going ferral
That doesn't seem right to me, as we cannot survive childhood without adults. Young humans are ready for life in society long before they are able to survive on their own without support from the society around them.
We have been depending on the continuation of some form of society for likely hundreds of thousands of years, not just for staying civilised but simply for survival.
Is that not what reasoning is in a debate?
> May be hypnosis is just a prompt injection attack.
No need to go into hypnosis. Mere prompts can inject false memories. This has been proven multiple times [1].
[1] The Brain: The Story of You, David Eagleman.
Exactly.
It seems to me that today's LLMs are on the level of human children. Children often say random bullshit. They try to figure out things, and succeed to some level, but fail spectacularly above that, regressing to whatever connection they can sense. It's only that human children most often learn to fear mistakes, so they stop expressing themselves so freely.
LLMs seem like human children, but without the fearing mistakes part - they just spew whatever comes to their mind, without filter (except those """ethical""" filters built in by OpenAI).
Humans are capable of creating cargo cults but it seems LLMs are destined for it.