Comment by ben_w
1 day ago
The answer is the same as how the messy bag of chemistry that is the human brain "knows" when it isn't sure:
Badly, and with great difficulty, so while it can just about be done, even then only kinda.
1 day ago
The answer is the same as how the messy bag of chemistry that is the human brain "knows" when it isn't sure:
Badly, and with great difficulty, so while it can just about be done, even then only kinda.
We really don’t understand the human brain well enough to have confidence that the mechanisms that cause people to respond with “I don’t know” are at all similar to the mechanisms which cause LLMs to give such responses. And there are quite a few prima facie reasons to think that they wouldn’t be the same.
FWIW, I'm describing failure modes of a human, not mechanisms.
I also think "would" in the comment I'm replying to is closer to "could" than to "does".
Could you expand on that? What failure modes are we talking about exactly?
The mechanics don't have to be similar, only analogous, in the morphology sense.
'Analogous in the morphology sense' is actually a more specific concept than 'similar'. But either way, we still don't know if they're analogous, or similar, or whatever term you prefer.
Anyone who actually understands both LLMs and the human brain well enough to make confident claims that they basically work the same really ought to put in the effort to write up a paper and get a Nobel prize or two.
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