Comment by CamperBob2

2 years ago

Why are people so eager to believe that people can? When it comes to the definitions of concepts like sentience, consciousness, thinking and understanding, we literally don't know what we're talking about.

It's premature in the extreme to point at something that behaves so much like we do ourselves and claim that whatever it's doing, it's not "understanding" anything.

We've studied human behavior enough to understand that there are differences between animals in the level of cognition and awareness they (outwardly) exhibit.

Are we not generally good at detecting when someone understands us? Perhaps it's because understanding has actual meaning. If you communicate to me that you hit your head and feel like shit, I not only understand that you experienced an unsatisfactory situation, I'm capable of empathy -- understanding not only WHAT happened, but HOW it feels -- and offering consolation or high fives or whatever.

A LLM has an understanding of what common responses were in the past, and repeats them. Statistical models may mimic a process we use in our thinking, but it is not the entirety of our thinking. Just like computers are limited to the programmers that code their behavior, LLMs are limited to the quality of the data corpus fed to them.

A human, you can correct in real time and they'll (try to) internalize that information in future interactions. Not so with LLMs.

By all means, tell us how statistically weighted answers to "what's the next word" correlates to understanding.

  • By all means, tell us how statistically weighted answers to "what's the next word" correlates to understanding.

    By all means, tell me what makes you so certain you're not arguing with an LLM right now. And if you were, what would you do about it, except type a series of words that depend on the previous ones you typed, and the ones that you read just prior to that?

    A human, you can correct in real time and they'll (try to) internalize that information in future interactions. Not so with LLMs.

    Not so with version 1.0, anyway. This is like whining that your Commodore 64 doesn't run Crysis.

    • Computers don't understand spite, and your entire comment was spite. You are trolling in an attempt to muddy the waters, a distinctly human thing.

      Go away, you clearly have nothing to counter with.

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