These things feel sentient because they talk like us, but if I told you that I have a machine that takes 1 20k-dimensional vector and turns it into another meaningful 20k-dimensional vector, you definitely wouldn't call that sentience.
EDIT: I couldn't help but make the joke, but I am certain my brain is doing zero dot products as a type this. What these models do is just different.
We should consider what that means, and the 'sentience' jump is just lazy thinking to avoid that.
I mean fine I’ll play along - is it whole numbers? Floating points? How many integers? Are we certain that neurons are even deterministic?
The point I’m making is this whole overuse of metaphor (I agree it’s an ok metaphor) belittles both what the brain and these models are doing. I get that we call them perceptrons and neurons, but friend, don’t tell me that a complex chemical system that we don’t understand is “matrix math” because dendrites exist. It’s kind of rude to your own endocrine system tbh.
Transformers and your brain are both extremely impressive and extremely different things. Doing things like adding biological-inspired noise and biological-inspired resilience might even make Transformers better! We don’t know! But we do know oversimplifying the model of the brain won’t help us get there!
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
The brain can't see, hear, smell, etc directly and neither can it talk or move hands or feet. "All" it does is receive incoming nerve signals from sensor neurons (which are connected to our sensory organs) and emit outgoing nerve signals through motor neurons (which are connected to our muscles).
So the "data format" is really not that different.
Not a neurologist, but that's about what you can read in basic biology textbooks.
There are plenty of inputs to the brain outside of neural signals and implying otherwise isn't even at the level of basic biology textbooks.
I'll put it this way - what are the 'sensor nerve signals' that make us tired pray tell? Do models 'get tired'?