This thought that “maybe we are just next token predictors too” is not particularly clever. Most of us have thought about that, but a bit of experience with LLMs make it obvious that’s not what’s going on here. I think it’s a bit like listening to a recording of a person and swearing there’s an actual person in the recording device because the audible output is indistinguishable from the real thing. Why would you do that? You wouldn’t unless you have no idea how a recording device works, in which case it seems like magic.
> a bit of experience with LLMs make it obvious that’s not what’s going on here
I feel like that overstates the point quite a bit. There's a lot that's similar: neurotransmitter release is stochastic at the vesicle level, ion channels open and close probabilistically, post-synaptic responses have noise. A given neuron receiving identical input twice doesn't produce identical output. Neither brains nor LLMs have a central decider that forms intent and then implements it. In both, decisions emerges from network dynamics, they're a description of what the system did, not a separate cause (see Libet's experiments).
Now pretty clearly there's a lot that's different, and of course we don't understand brains enough to say just how similar they are to LLMs, but that's the point: it's an interesting thought experiment and shutting it down with a virtual eyeroll is sad.
A one-way audio channel is indeed too weak for a person to distinguish a person from a recording, but a bidirectional audio channel is easily strong enough: the person can verbally ask the person-or-recording a question and see if it is acknowledged.
I claim that a modern frontier LLM can be given simple instructions that make it impossible for a person to reliably distinguish it from a person over a bidirectional text-only medium.
You’re missing my point. If you brought that voice recorder back in time a few hundred years even without the 2-way communication, people would swear there is a disembodied person in there, and you would be accused of being a witch. This is because humans always anthropomorphize things with human-like traits that they do not deeply understand. Yes, LLMs can now take human input and create human-like output. But the connection I’m trying to make is that these things are a black box to most of us, and we are yet again anthropomorphizing. We are still lacking the understanding part.
With all due respect, your claim is ridiculous. It’s incredibly easy to spot an LLM in an interactive chat. The tells are endless.
If you seriously cannot tell what is the difference between a human being and a LLM and think they are both "autocompleters", you know very little about both humans and LLMs.
I cannot. Please explain the difference to me. Everything I've read about neuroscience is basically the brain is a signal prediction machine. The harness, signals and incentive (hormone) systems may be different, but predicting the future is basic building blocks of intelligence.
How much karma do you have on reddit, probably millions.
Only redditors with Dunning-Kruger would say something like this.
I reccomend the podcast Machine Learning Street Talk, you'll find plenty of machine learning PhDs who are also neuroscientists that are completely mystified by the brain, how it works and what intelligence is. The people at the forefront of nueroscience definately aren't reducing human intelligence and experience to "signal processing", or whatever you think it is.
I mostly stopped using Reddit in 2016, and was site banned in 2019 (for posting "gnews.com" in answer to the question of which site has the Biden laptop leak).
I didn't say "signal processing", I stated 'signal prediction machine'. This is not my idea, I would say my more source is the book On Intelligence, written by neuroscientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence but this idea is hundreds of thousands of years old.
oh really？
China considers itself a democracy with its own characteristics. According to China's White Paper "China: Democracy That Works" published by the State Council Information Office, China practices "whole-process people's democracy," which integrates process and results democracy, procedural and substantive democracy, direct and indirect democracy, and people's democracy and state will.
China's democracy is described as "people's democracy" where people are the masters of the country, which is considered the essence and core of China's democracy. The Chinese perspective emphasizes that democracy is not a decorative item but a means to solve problems that need to be addressed by the people.
However, China's democratic system differs from Western democratic models, which typically feature multi-party systems, competitive elections, and separation of powers. China argues that democracy takes different forms rooted in each country's historical and cultural traditions, and that its model represents "the most extensive, most genuine, and most effective socialist democracy."
The classification of China as a democracy ultimately depends on the definition of democracy one uses, as different countries and scholars have varying criteria for what constitutes a democratic system.
Thanks for clarifying. Actually Chinas democracy sounds really nice now. Would love to try it out where people are actually the masters of the country :)
(Btw this chinese ai-propaganda-bot parent is the best example why we need to keep china out of our digital infrastructure and ban apps like tiktok. They are already brainwashing western kids with shit like this fake user above. )
Telling you a joke that's very popular in China, we call it a 'Soviet Joke'.
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American: "Why did you come to America?"
Soviet: "I came to learn your brainwashing techniques."
American: "Nonsense! We're a free and democratic country—no brainwashing here!"
Soviet: "Exactly! That's precisely what I want to learn!"
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