Comment by Lplololopo
18 hours ago
Compression is the reason why these Models are able to learn and understand.
My brain is doing the exact same thing.
I learned enough to compress concepts like a bike and what a bike does and for what i can use a bike.
Ask a LLM and it will answer you similiar to humans.
Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description.
LLMs just have so much data in form of text available and are able to ingest all of this, that the LLM compression algorithm doesn't has to be that good/finetuned than ours.
But I would assume that Yann LeCun's JEPA or other breakthroughs in the next few years will get us there.
Compression and existence of mechanism to expound on it does not imply consciousness.
Otherwise, yes, finally people observe the very apparent fact that LLMs are one very smart compression.
> Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description.
And by touch and sound. And maybe some were daring enough to drive one, or unlucky enough to get hit by one. But have way more input than just texts.
Obligatory echolocation bit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a05kgcI9D2Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtVOK04XvA
Invisibilia's episode was my first exposure to it.
https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
The man posits that clicking is instinctual for blind people but they are told to quiet down in class and most never develop their echolocation abilities
Wow. Thank you.
LLMs also have other inputs, like audio and images. They get encoded (just like a human eye encodes an image) and passed to the weights.
I don’t think this analogy holds. The whole way through the processing pipeline in the brain, different sensory data is ingested separately and processed separately; and we still don’t understand how that data is then integrated into a cohesive experience.
LLMs have the same fundamental input regardless of modality, tokens. There is a preprocessing step before the “brain”, which is more akin to some super-synesthesia where all senses are translated into sound before becoming experience.
So a blind person only can describe lava to you after they touched and heared it?
A blind person has touched warm and hot things and gotten burned before, and then they are told lava is this molten liquid that is even hotter than anything they have touched. That is enough for them to understand.
A blind person that never touched a hot object wouldn't really know though, there is a reason we dismiss talk from people who lack experience.
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