Comment by csdvrx

10 days ago

> Returning to the topic of the limitations of LLMs, LeCun explains, "An LLM produces one token after another. It goes through a fixed amount of computation to produce a token, and that's clearly System 1—it's reactive, right? There's no reasoning," a reference to Daniel Kahneman's influential framework that distinguishes between the human brain's fast, intuitive method of thinking (System 1) and the method of slower, more deliberative reasoning (System 2).

Many people believe that "wants" come first, and are then followed by rationalizations. It's also a theory that's supported by medical imaging.

Maybe the LLM are a good emulation of system-2 (their perfomance sugggest it is), and what's missing is system-1, the "reptilian" brain, based on emotions like love, fear, aggression, (etc.).

For all we know, the system-1 could use the same embeddings, and just work in parallel and produce tokens that are used to guide the system-2.

Personally, I trust my "emotions" and "gut feelings": I believe they are things "not yet rationalized" by my system-2, coming straight from my system-1.

I know it's very unpopular among nerds, but it has worked well enough for me!

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csdvrx

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kadushka  10 days ago

There are LLMs which do not generate one token at a time: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09992

They do not reason significantly better than autoregressive LLMs. Which makes me question “one token at a time” as the bottleneck.

Also, Lecun has been pushing his JEPA idea for years now - with not much to show for it. With his resources one could hope we would see the benefits of that over the current state of the art models.

  • financypants  10 days ago

    from the article: LeCun has been working in some way on V-JEPA for two decades. At least it's bold, and, everyone says it won't work until one day it might

sho_hn  10 days ago

Re the "medical imaging" reference, many of those are built on top of one famous study recording movement before conscious realization that isn't as clear-cut as it entered popular knowledge as: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will...

I know there are other examples, and I'm not attacking your post; mainly it's a great opportunity to link this IMHO interesting article that interacts with many debates on HN.

  • csdvrx  10 days ago

    > IMHO interesting article that interacts with many debates on HN.

    It's paywalled

ilaksh  10 days ago

I think what that shows is that in order for the fast reactions to be useful, they really have to incorporate holistic information effectively. That doesn't mean that slower conscious rational work can't lead to more precision, but does suggest that immediate reactions shouldn't necessarily be ignored. There is an analogy between that and reasoning versus non-reasoning with LLMs.