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Comment by saxonww | Hacker News Reader

> 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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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.

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

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.

The point I'm trying to make is that I don't think we know, so we can't say either way.

In your example, would the human have ever had contact with other humans, or would it be placed in the room as a baby with no further input?

They grew up in a tribe that hasn't discovered numbers yet.

Those who argue that AI is like human cognition don't know much about AI or human cognition.

Those who argue that AI is like a parrot don't know much about anything at all.

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