Neither are our brains.

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”

― Peter Watts, Blindsight (fiction)

Starting to think we're really not much smarter. "But LLMs tell us what we want to hear!" Been on FaceBook lately, or lemmy?

If nothing else, LLMs have woke me to how stupid humans are vs. the machines.

Sounds pretty human to me. no /s

I work in risk management, but don't really have a strong understanding of LLM mechanics. "Confidence" is something that i quantify in my work, but it has different terms that are associated with it. In modeling outcomes, I may say that we have 60% confidence in achieving our budget objectives, while others would express the same result by saying our chances of achieving our budget objective are 60%. Again, I'm not sure if this is what the LLM is doing, but if it is producing a modeled prediction with a CDF of possible outcomes, then representing its result with 100% confindence means that the LLM didn't model any other possible outcomes other than the answer it is providing, which does seem troubling.

It's like talking with someone who thinks the Earth is flat. There isn't anything to discuss. They're objectively wrong.

Humans like to anthropomorphize everything. It's why you can see a face on a car's front grille. LLMs are ultra advanced pattern matching algorithms. They do not think or reason or have any kind of opinion or sentience, yet they are being utilized as if they do. Let's see how it works out for the world, I guess.

They can even get math wrong. Which surprised me. Had to tell it the answer is wrong for them to recalculate and then get the correct answer. It was simple percentages of a list of numbers I had asked.

There are plenty of similarities in the output of both the human brain and LLMs, but overall they’re very different. Unlike LLMs, the human brain is generally intelligent - it can adapt to a huge variety of cognitive tasks. LLMs, on the other hand, can only do one thing: generate language. It’s tempting to anthropomorphize systems like ChatGPT because of how competent they seem, but there’s no actual thinking going on. It’s just generating language based on patterns and probabilities.

Nah so their definition is the classical "how confident are you that you got the answer right". If you read the article they asked a bunch of people and 4 LLMs a bunch of random questions, then asked the respondent whether they/it had confidence their answer was correct, and then checked the answer. The LLMs initially lined up with people (over confident) but then when they iterated, shared results and asked further questions the LLMs confidence increased while people's tends to decrease to mitigate the over confidence.

But the study still assumes intelligence enough to review past results and adjust accordingly, but disregards the fact that an AI isnt intelligence, it's a word prediction model based on a data set of written text tending to infinity. It's not assessing validity of results, it's predicting what the answer is based on all previous inputs. The whole study is irrelevant.

Interesting talk but the number of times he completely dismisses the entire field of linguistics kind of makes me think he's being disingenuous about his familiarity with it.

For one, I think he is dismissing holotes, the concept of "wholeness." That when you cut something apart to it's individual parts, you lose something about the bigger picture. This deconstruction of language misses the larger picture of the human body as a whole, and how every part of us, from our assemblage of organs down to our DNA, impact how we interact with and understand the world. He may have a great definition of understanding but it still sounds (to me) like it's potentially missing aspects of human/animal biologically based understanding.

For example, I have cancer, and about six months before I was diagnosed, I had begun to get more chronically depressed than usual. I felt hopeless and I didn't know why. Surprisingly, that's actually a symptom of my cancer. What understanding did I have that changed how I felt inside and how I understood the things around me? Suddenly I felt different about words and ideas, but nothing had changed externally, something had change internally. The connections in my neural network had adjusted, the feelings and associations with words and ideas was different, but I hadn't done anything to make that adjustment. No learning or understanding had happened. I had a mutation in my DNA that made that adjustment for me.

Further, I think he's deeply misunderstanding (possibly intentionally?) what linguists like Chomsky are saying when they say humans are born with language. They mean that we are born with a genetic blueprint to understand language. Just like animals are born with a genetic blueprint to do things they were never trained to do. Many animals are born and almost immediately stand up to walk. This is the same principle. There are innate biologically ingrained understandings that help us along the path to understanding. It does not mean we are born understanding language as much as we are born with the building blocks of understanding the physical world in which we exist.

Anyway, interesting talk, but I immediately am skeptical of anyone who wholly dismisses an entire field of thought so casually.

For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you and I'm sorry people are doing so.

Language models are unsuitable for math problems broadly speaking. We already have good technology solutions for that category of problems. Luckily, you can combine the two - prompt the model to write a program that solves your math problem, then execute it. You're likely to see a lot more success using this approach.

What a terrible headline. Self-aware? Really?

I think there's two basic mistakes that you made. First, you think that we aren't experts, but it's definitely true that some of us have studied these topics for years in college or graduate school, and surely many other people are well read on the subject. Obviously you can't easily confirm our backgrounds, but we exist. Second, people who are somewhat aware of the topic might realize that it's not particularly productive to engage in discussion on it here because there's too much background information that's missing. It's often the case that experts don't try to discuss things because it's the wrong venue, not because they feel superior.

Every thread about LLMs has to have some guy like yourself saying how LLMs are like humans and smarter than humans for some reason.

Is that a recycled piece from 2023? Because we already knew that.

Oh shit, they do behave like humans after all.

prompting concerns

Oh you.

Ah, the monte-carlo approach to truth.

I once gave some kind of math problem (how to break down a certain amount of money into bills) and the llm wrote a python script for it, ran it and thus gave me the correct answer. Kind of clever really.

I think so too, but I am really curious what will happen when we give them "bodies" with sensors so they can explore the world and make individual "experiences". I could imagine they would act much more human after a while and might even develop some kind of sentience.

Of course they would also need some kind of memory and self-actualization processes.

Some humans are not as smart as LLMs, I give them that.