Comment by kristov
14 hours ago
I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in it that operates in a similar way to an LLM (like the human "unconscious", or "intuition" maybe). It seems obvious to me that a human brain and an LLM are not comparable things, for many reasons. So we can not make inferrences one way or the other.
> An LLM is not a human brain,
true
> and does not try to emulate one
citation please.
something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator
I think you're right in that it has the shape but I think it's missing a pretty key piece. We still haven't been able to solve catastrophic forgetting, yet everything with a brain has. Basically LLMs seem good at approximating intelligence on a moment-to-moment basis, but feel quite far away when you chat with one over time.
Like at some level, yes, transformers are trying to emulate a human brain but the second you ask folks if they do a good job of it, I think most rationale people would say no.
> something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator
That says nothing about emulating a human brain.
is human cognition not an algorithm? is it just woo? or vibes?
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