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What do humans have that LLMs don't

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11–16 of 16 posts

Re: What do humans have that LLMs don't

#11

The answer is that humans have genitalia. And while that may seem trite, it's really not. you can't separate humans thinking from the underlying hardware. Until LLM's are able to experience real emotion, and emotion here really means a stick by which to lead the LLM, it will always be different from humans.

Not all humans have genetalia.

Re: What do humans have that LLMs don't

#12

> LLMs produce their answers with a fixed amount of computation per token I'm not that confident that humans don't do this. Neurons are slow enough that we can't really have a very large number of sequential steps behind a given thought. Longer complex considerations are difficult (for me at least) without at least thinking out loud to cache my thoughts in audible memory, or having a piece of paper to store and revie…

Yes, this is key. This idea that humans also require sequences to think was popularized by Jeff Hawkins even before all the LLM hype.

He was able to show that the equivalent of place cells (normally used to determine one's physical location) fire sequentially when humans perform tasks like listening to music or imagine feeling along the rim of a coffee cup.

The think step-by-step trick might just be scratching the surface of the various mechanisms we can use to give LLMs this kind of internal voice.

Re: What do humans have that LLMs don't

#13

The answer is that humans have genitalia. And while that may seem trite, it's really not. you can't separate humans thinking from the underlying hardware. Until LLM's are able to experience real emotion, and emotion here really means a stick by which to lead the LLM, it will always be different from humans.

I guess the more important aspect (although not totally unrelated) is that humans are mortal.

Re: What do humans have that LLMs don't

#14
The difference is, LLMs are way better than most humans at impressing gullible morons, even highly intelligent gullible morons. In truth it's only an incomprehensible statistical model that does what it's told to do, without agency, motivation or ideas. Smart people have build something, they themselves cannot fully understand and the results remind me a lot of what Weizenbaum said about eliza: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."

Re: What do humans have that LLMs don't

#16

The answer is that humans have genitalia. And while that may seem trite, it's really not. you can't separate humans thinking from the underlying hardware. Until LLM's are able to experience real emotion, and emotion here really means a stick by which to lead the LLM, it will always be different from humans.

Not all humans have genetalia.

Not all humans have feet.
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