Hacker News Reader

Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

Disagree about the burden of proof. We have no better model for how human decision making works than LLMs. Humans are constantly predicting the next moment. We certainly have a different “tokenizer” and training set, but many of the concepts underpinning LLMs are both biologically inspired and, likely, have similar consequences and emergent architectures.

View on HN

> We certainly have a different “tokenizer” and training set, but many of the concepts underpinning LLMs are both biologically inspired and, likely, have similar consequences and emergent architectures.

My kids tricycle certainly has a different gear setup and wheel diameter, but many of the concepts underpinning the tricycle are both inspired by F1 race car enineering and, likely, have similar consequences and emergent architectures.

Or have they?

This is why I hate analogies. They're almost always either relevant or inapposite depending on the level of generalization we're operating on.

It sucks because I think analogies can be useful in helping people make a mental model of complex things, which is meaningfully beneficial. The problems happen when people aren’t honest about the limits of the analogies, which is damned-near guaranteed to happen with this stuff.

> We have no better model for how human decision making works than LLMs

This is a claim that requires a lot of citations.

> biologically inspired

Nature inspires a lot of creation, but superficial similarities don’t mean other aspects are similar. Making an extremely realistic sculpture of a soufflé, even using a foam medium, doesn’t bring me any closer to being a chef, doesn’t mean I know anything about albumen foams, sauces, and heat transfer, and it doesn’t bring me any closer to having dinner ready. Browning on top of a soufflé is evidence of maillardization. You could pull up some studies on that and claim the brown on top of the soufflé sculpture, which I applied with an airbrush, proved that the Maillard reaction was occurring, and if another person didn’t know anything about cooking, they might even believe you. It would, of course, be completely wrong. And the other person, of course, could loudly exclaim that I can’t prove that there was no maillardization.

> Humans are constantly predicting the next moment

This is really not my experience of consciousness.

Is it yours??

Do you sit in meetings predicting what’s going to happen next? No, you sit there bored out of your f$$@ing mind, daydreaming about being somewhere else and doing something useful with your life.

God help me if that’s what LLMs are doing when I ask them to build me a web site.

They have shown that your mind is doing exactly that due to the delays in consciousness. There are very simple examples that you can try to see it. It’s especially clear in perception.

https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-...

It’s interesting that our conscious interpreter doesn’t let us know that this is going on like you are experiencing, it must be that it’s advantageous for us to not think about the prediction part of our mind.

If someone in that meeting quickly raised a hand in an arc, you would notice the “about to throw something” pattern, look and notice the hand holds an eraser, analyze the arc and predict possible flight paths of the eraser. Then possibly notice the hand is now holding its position and the owner is actually looking down at the table. Maybe to squash somethingMust be something on the table. Maybe a spider! Better look. Wait now many people are moving away, oh someone spilt some water and the eraser is actually the guys phone and he is checking to see if his laptop is safe from the spilt water.

Fortunately you are on the other side of the table and predict the water isn’t going to splash for otherwise flow onto your stuff.

All your possible responses result in you tossing a napkin towards the spill.

Our brains are always pattern matching and predicting. I bet you tried to reason out where I was going with my comment before you finished reading it.

This is a fascinating illustration that I can't help but agree with. However I feel like there's something more — that this part of my brain is a bunch of supportive background processes running without my real awareness. It's how I can drive home safely with no memory of how I got there (…sober), even though driving is an action that's incredibly demanding of intelligence. I can be driving home while thinking about a really hard problem at work that I haven't solved.

However, if I came around a corner and saw a car in the wrong lane, a tree across the road, a fire raging — I'd very quickly jump into the mental driver's seat and turn my conscious intelligence fully at this problem and come up with the best possible outcome I can think of in a short period of time — losing all ability to think about that work problem. I'd remember that incident for sure.

Similarly, in your story, all those predictive moments are happening below the person's level of consciousness. They're possibly even speaking to the group about a problem at the same time and thinking deeply about something.

I'm not smart enough to know, but I tend to feel like LLMs are much more like the predictive part of our thinking that you described, but that human cognition has something more — the single-threaded, creative, problem-solving part that is very conscious.

Is it possible that LLMs represent only one part of the way we think? And there's a whole separate mechanism that's fundamentally different, and not based on pattern matching and prediction?

> We have no better model for how human decision making works than LLMs

We do have some models and guess what, they're based on simpler animals. Which is most likely the better model.

Some other models are based on neurosciences, because we can track electrical activity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com