Comment by infinite_spin
4 days ago
> it doesn't mean it's intelligent
I'm not sure how you're defining "intelligent", but I'd like to know how it is able to exclude a language model, while still including humans, without simply defining it with an axiom that predefines LLMs as lacking intelligence.
Intelligence is the complete opposite of an LLM. Usually the more you needed to memorize to do something the less intelligent you were considered.
It was also not considered to be a different route to the same thing, but more like fraud.
Also conceptually I could just write the weights on paper and do the billion multiplications on paper without any computer, does that mean I am the paper or the numbers or what??
> Intelligence is the complete opposite of an LLM. Usually the more you needed to memorize to do something the less intelligent you were considered.
Contrary to popular belief, training a LLM is not just about memorization (overfitting). There is some memorization happening, but well-trained LLMs also generalize.
> Intelligence is the complete opposite of an LLM
Like I said, "without simply defining it with an axiom that predefines LLMs as lacking intelligence"
Intelligent humans are capable of following diverse and intricate analogies and draw lessons from seemingly unrelated events. Try asking an LLM to summarize an article and use an imprecise way to state your view. Ask it to push back. You will be drawn into so many pedantic arguments that burn through your tokens within a few messages, you'd wonder if there's someone deliberately taking over the keyboard on their side and spending your token limit. This would never happen with an intelligent human being unless they have nothing better to do and want to troll. This is a speech pattern that LLMs are trained on, it's not a show of intelligence. This also applies to LLMs claiming consciousness: The internet is full of people writing about sentience, talking to "superior aliens" in blog posts, forum threads etc. It's the speech pattern that's copied, not actual thoughts and feelings because LLMs perceive, suffer, have aims or dreams...
Agentic systems use LLMs, and they are absolutely able to follow diverse and intricate analogies. I use them frequently to hunt down notoriously difficult to find memory leaks, in codebases too large for a human to read in a single sitting. They are able to not only follow those intricate paths, they're able to discover solutions and apply those solutions. I use these systems quite a bit, and it's nothing like you've described.
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An LLM has a fixed number of ways it can express itself. we can give it an array of 14 billion options but it still has to chose one to output. Humans have no such limitation.
An LLM does not persist in consciousness from one token to the next. Each generation, happening hundreds of times a second, will be initialized, generate an output, and terminate. Humans are not stateless like an LLM.
You're conflating a singular model with a much larger system, but I want to address some of your points anyway.
> An LLM has a fixed number of ways it can express itself
While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.
> An LLM does not persist in consciousness from one token to the next
While a model alone does not update itself to persist some form of history, there are a number of ways to overcome this, e.g. episodic memory, fine-tuning, and other self-improvement systems exist, which can indeed carry forward what you've called "consciousness".
> Humans are not stateless like an LLM.
A single LLM might be stateless, but an agentic system that relies on LLMs is very often not.
> While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.
You're missing the point, which is that no matter the process involved. The LLM can only ever output one of the tokens in its token vector. It can't invent a new symbol or character. It can't leave and go build a church. It has to output a little piece of data for you.
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