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Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that the way in which they're childish is actually extremely human. In fact, one of the ways that you're often taught to draw more realistically is to stop thinking of the concepts as icons you're drawing the outlines of, and instead sort of blur your eyes and see things as they are: hues and values. In other words, become a camera or a printer that has no idea what it's capturing or printing other than a grid of values. That is how you achieve realism.

The fact that it has clearly iconified these concepts in its mind and is tracing the outlines of the things it thinks/expects to go where is very human.

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Parrots can also sound extremely human, but it’s only mimicry.

How do we know the difference?

Yes, but Parrots don't mimic the stages of learning speech development like children do. They just memorize a phrase.

These SOTA LLMs aren't trying to mimic existing children's drawings, but interestingly they're following somewhat similar progression that human children do as they develop.

They don’t develop. We should stop anthropomorphizing LLMs.

AI labs are improving the ML techniques used to build better models; it’s a big difference.

Isn't LLM training, the development?

The LLMs themselves are not doing the developing or learning.

Can you explain what you mean by this? Aren't the LLMs developing as they're trained?

LLMs come complete they don't train on the fly based on interaction with the world. LLMs are wikipedia if they stopped allowing edits and all of the previous edits are training.

there is infact RL for LLMs and its unlikely the frontier labs do not use it in some ways

That's very clearly what they're referring to also, or at least I certainly doubt this would be lost on them, or most anyone here, at this point.

I imagine that it should be clear to everyone here now, until I read threads like this comparing child development to the advances in LLM building.

It’s like saying that a new M-Apple chip developed like a child. There is a clear tendency to give human like attributes to LLMs, probably caused by the terms used in ML: training, learning, etc.

I'm not so sure about this view.

For me, it was the same genre of comment as e.g. comments that call out how vision models tend to be structured surprisingly similarly to how the visual cortex is structured, even without specifically attempting to make that happen, and within the boundaries of our understanding of either things of course.

So not so much anthropomorphization, and more a recognition of the unintentional, and surprising, biomimicry.

Though to be honest, I'll be damned if any of the pictures in the post look anything like any child drawing I've ever seen, Grok's or any of the other models.

No, it's more like you're being overly literal. As a field the technology is developing. Just like people might say "in the 60's integrated circuits developed quickly".

The parent wasn't referring to individual LLMs developing, but that overall new SOTA LLMs models are increasing in capabilities in ways similar to how human children do.

Both statements are true without contradiction.

A specific model develops as it passes through training.

AI labs change the architecture between models to allow them to surpass the previous models' best scores.

It's also going to keep being a hard sell to say "stop anthropomorphizing LLMs" when the models anthropomorphise themselves.

But besides that: Yeah, sure, they're not human, they're a cargo-cult mimicry of by and of minds that popped out of evolution doing gradient decent on intergenerational survivability. So what? Still interesting when the result of such cargo-culting incidentally echoes what our natural-selection-not-engineered moist electrochemistry happens to do.

If you want to know if something is a human or a parrot, you could give it a paint brush and ask it to paint the Mona Lisa.

you can also use your eyes, hands or other senses :').

reminds me of those jokes?

what is difference between a parot and a human? silence rly? u cant tell the difference between a parot and a human? :')

What's your parrot's take on the Jacobian Conjecture?

My parrot doesn't have a take, but it sure can repeat one it heard on Reddit.

So, you're saying that it was somebody on Reddit who disproved the conjecture, and not a "stochastic parrot?"

You asked for my parrot's take, not how to disprove a conjecture.

Edit: And not a great example to use to prove human-ness considering humans didn't disprove the conjecture?

Parrot analogies for frontier AI are so stupid that they prove human-ness by dint of being a mistake no thinking entity would make.

Perhaps you can answer this for me.

Why do some people get very defensive when you suggest AI isn’t comparable to humans?

Like, where is it coming from?

Why do people seem to want to ascribe human traits on the tech? It’s just technology. Why do we need to draw parallels to biology? Is it actually helpful? My position is “no” because the parallels only seem similar, but fundamentally aren’t.

Why do some people get very defensive when you suggest AI isn’t comparable to humans?

But you didn't do that, did you? You rattled off a goofy cliché about parrots that we've all heard a hundred times before. If that's all you have to contribute to the conversation, go contribute it somewhere else.

Yes - precisely what I was getting at with the childish comment.

It felt a bit surreal to see a machines rendition of something that very closely maps to a younger human as they explore + understand more about the world. Scary, even (to me). This was the first time I’ve seen LLM output and thought “wow, maybe it is learning.”

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