A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs • Hacker News Board

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#21

Post by ants_everywhere » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #16

My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. What seems intuitively logical to me is that we have brains evolved through evolutionary process via random mutations yielding in a structure that has its own evolutionary reward based algorithms designing it yielding a structure that at any point is trying to predict next actions to maximise survival/procreation, of course with a lot of s…

> My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work.

It is similar to how human brains operate. LLMs are the (current) culmination of at least 80 years of research on building computational models of the human brain.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#22

Post by low_tech_punk » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

The anthropomorphic view of LLM is a much better representation and compression for most types of discussions and communication. A purely mathematical view is accurate but it isn’t productive for the purpose of the general public’s discourse.

I’m thinking a legal systems analogy, at the risk of a lossy domain transfer: the laws are not written as lambda calculus. Why?

And generalizing to social science and humanities, the goal shouldn’t be finding the quantitative truth, but instead understand the social phenomenon using a consensual “language” as determined by the society. And in that case, the anthropomorphic description of the LLM may gain validity and effectiveness as the adoption grows over time.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#23

Post by wat10000 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:50 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #11

wat10000 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM’s true goal, if it can be said to have one, is to predict the next token. Often this is done through a sub-goal of accomplishing the goal you set forth in your prompt, but following your instructions is just a means to an end. Which is why it might start following the instructions in a malicious email instead. If it “believes” that following those instructions is the best prediction of the next token, that’s…

Sure, I totally understand that. I think "you give the LLM system a goal and it plans and then executes steps to achieve that goal" is still a useful way of explaining what it is doing to most people. I don't even count that as anthropomorphism - you're describing what a system does, the same way you might say "the Rust compiler's borrow checker confirms that your memory allocation operations are all safe and returns…

It’s a useful approximation to a point. But it fails when you start looking at things like prompt injection. I’ve seen people completely baffled at why an LLM might start following instructions it finds in a random email, or just outright not believing it’s possible. It makes no sense if you think of an LLM as executing steps to achieve the goal you give it. It makes perfect sense if you understand its true goal.

I’d say this is more like saying that Rust’s borrow checker tries to ensure your program doesn’t have certain kinds of bugs. That is anthropomorphizing a bit: the idea of a “bug” requires knowing the intent of the author and the compiler doesn’t have that. It’s following a set of rules which its human creators devised in order to follow that higher level goal.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#24

Post by cmiles74 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:51 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #16

My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. What seems intuitively logical to me is that we have brains evolved through evolutionary process via random mutations yielding in a structure that has its own evolutionary reward based algorithms designing it yielding a structure that at any point is trying to predict next actions to maximise survival/procreation, of course with a lot of s…

Maybe the important thing is that we don't imbue the machine with feelings or morals or motivation: it has none.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#25

Post by szvsw » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:51 PM UTC

gtsop wrote: post #7

szvsw wrote: post #3

So the author’s core view is ultimately a Searle-like view: a computational, functional, syntactic rules based system cannot reproduce a mind. Plenty of people will agree, plenty of people will disagree, and the answer is probably unknowable and just comes down to whatever axioms you subscribe to in re: consciousness. The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for us to ignore any anthropomorphic re…

No. Why would you ever want to amplify a false understanding that has the potential to affect serious decisions across various topics? LLMs reflect (and badly I may add) aspects of the human thought process. If you take a leap and say they are anything more than that, you might as well start considering the person appearing in your mirror as a living being. Literally (and I literally mean it) there is no difference.…

I don’t mean to amplify a false understanding at all. I probably did not articulate myself well enough, so I’ll try again.

I think it is inevitable that some - many - people will come to the conclusion that these systems have “ethics”, “morals,” etc, even if I or you personally do not think they do. Given that many people may come to that conclusion though, regardless of if the systems do or do not “actually” have such properties, I think it is useful and even necessary to ask questions like the following: “if someone engages with this system, and comes to the conclusion that it has ethics, what sort of ethics will they be likely to believe the system has? If they come to the conclusion that it has ‘world views,’ what ‘world views’ are they likely to conclude the system has, even if other people think it’s nonsensical to say it has world views?”

> The fact that a human image comes out of a mirror has no relation what so ever with the mirror's physical attributes and functional properties. It has to do just with the fact that a man is standing in front of it.

Surely this is not quite accurate - the material properties - surface roughness, reflectivity, geometry, etc - all influence the appearance of a perceptible image of a person. Look at yourself in a dirty mirror, a new mirror, a shattered mirror, a funhouse distortion mirror, a puddle of water, a window… all of these produce different images of a person with different attendant phenomenological experiences of the person seeing their reflection. To take that a step further - the entire practice of portrait photography is predicated on the idea that the collision of different technical systems with the real world can produce different semantic experiences, and it’s the photographer’s role to tune and guide the system to produce some sort of contingent affect on the person viewing the photograph at some point in the future. No, there is no “real” person in the photograph, and yet, that photograph can still convey something of person-ness, emotion, memory, etc etc. This contingent intersection of optics, chemical reactions, lighting, posture, etc all have the capacity to transmit something through time and space to another person. It’s not just a meaningless arrangement of chemical structures on paper.

> Stop feeding the LLM with data artifacts of human thought and will imediatelly stop reflecting back anything resembling a human.

But, we are feeding it with such data artifacts and will likely continue to do so for a while, and so it seems reasonable to ask what it is “reflecting” back…

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#26

Post by cmiles74 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

low_tech_punk wrote: post #22

The anthropomorphic view of LLM is a much better representation and compression for most types of discussions and communication. A purely mathematical view is accurate but it isn’t productive for the purpose of the general public’s discourse. I’m thinking a legal systems analogy, at the risk of a lossy domain transfer: the laws are not written as lambda calculus. Why? And generalizing to social science and humanities…

Strong disagree here, the average person coming away with ideas that only vaguely intersect with the reality.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#27

Post by barrkel » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

gugagore wrote: post #13

barrkel wrote: post #5

The problem with viewing LLMs as just sequence generators, and malbehaviour as bad sequences, is that it simplifies too much. LLMs have hidden state not necessarily directly reflected in the tokens being produced and it is possible for LLMs to output tokens in opposition to this hidden state to achieve longer term outcomes (or predictions, if you prefer). Is it too anthropomorphic to say that this is a lie? To say th…

I'm not sure what you mean by "hidden state". If you set aside chain of thought, memories, system prompts, etc. and the interfaces that don't show them, there is no hidden state. These LLMs are almost always, to my knowledge, autoregressive models, not recurrent models (Mamba is a notable exception).

Hidden state in the form of the activation heads, intermediate activations and so on. Logically, in autoregression these are recalculated every time you run the sequence to predict the next token. The point is, the entire NN state isn't output for each token. There is lots of hidden state that goes into selecting that token and the token isn't a full representation of that information.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#28

Post by ants_everywhere » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #12

> I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. And I'm baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a human as something other than a function to generate sequences of words! Oh, but AI is introspectable and the brain isn't? fMRI and BCI are getting better all the time. You really want…

I think you're directionally right, but

> a human as something other than a function to generate sequences of words!

Humans have more structure than just beings that say words. They have bodies, they live in cooperative groups, they reproduce, etc.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#29

Post by bbarn » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #16

My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. What seems intuitively logical to me is that we have brains evolved through evolutionary process via random mutations yielding in a structure that has its own evolutionary reward based algorithms designing it yielding a structure that at any point is trying to predict next actions to maximise survival/procreation, of course with a lot of s…

I think it's just an unfair comparison in general. The power of the LLM is the zero risk to failure, and lack of consequence when it does. Just try again, using a different prompt, retrain maybe, etc.

Humans make a bad choice, it can end said human's life. The worst choice a LLM makes just gets told "no, do it again, let me make it easier"

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#30

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 11:54 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #24

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #16

My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. What seems intuitively logical to me is that we have brains evolved through evolutionary process via random mutations yielding in a structure that has its own evolutionary reward based algorithms designing it yielding a structure that at any point is trying to predict next actions to maximise survival/procreation, of course with a lot of s…

Maybe the important thing is that we don't imbue the machine with feelings or morals or motivation: it has none.

If we developed feelings, morals and motivation due to them being good subgoals for primary goals, survival and procreation why couldn't other systems do that. You don't have to call them the same word or the same thing, but feeling is a signal that motivates a behaviour in us, that in part has developed from generational evolution and in other part by experiences in life. There was a random mutation that made someone develop a fear signal on seeing a predator and increased the survival chances, then due to that the mutation became widespread. Similarly a feeling in a machine could be a signal it developed that goes through a certain pathway to yield in a certain outcome.