Comment by 9dev
2 months ago
Just because it sounds coherent doesn’t mean it is. You can make up false equivalence for anything if you try hard enough: A sheet of plywood also has many similarities with humans (made from carbon, contain water, break when hit hard enough), but that doesn’t mean they are even remotely equal.
I didn't write they were equal. I wrote they are similar in many ways.
Comparing LLM to humans make much more sense than comparing them to computer programs.
Only if you don’t really know anything about biology, biochemistry, psychology, or cognitive science. Transformer algorithms are amazing, but they are still algorithms running in silicon chips. We can describe them, we can debug them, hell we can model them in Excel if we so desire.
None of this is true for brains, let alone consciousness.
We are not talking about "transformer algorithms" we are talking about LLMs. And we don't know exactly why they work so well. If you do please share it with the world, lots of scientists would love to hear about it.
As for consciousness I have yet to see a definition that would describe something observable and exclude LLMs at the same time.