Comment by skydhash
14 hours ago
> 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.
You don't know that. Yo don't know what someone would think if you tell them the general concept of cold and warm.
The reaction you should have, the feeling etc.
I asked chatgpt how it would describe a scene without mentioning temperature. It was very good in describing what a human would describe.
I'm aware of the bias we have against LLMs but I think people just underestimate how much data is there.
I'm not saying a robot wouldn't be better with this information or an LLM and they actually use temperature sensors for robots so they can control movement speed and dexterity with overheating elements but the gap is small.
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