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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21159 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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I understood you to be making four separate claims, here and below:

  1. Humans are just LLMs on top of a multi-modal head.
  2. We have discovered how human intelligence works.
  3. We have discovered how human consciousness works.
  4. This proves that all human experience is the product of naturally-occurring accidents of genetics, with all the implicit consequences for philosophy, religion, etc.

If you'll forgive me, this seems to be shooting very far out into the Bailey and I would therefore like to narrow it down towards a defensible Motte.

Counter-claims:

  1. It is very unlikely that human brains operate on a deep-learning paradigm that resembles anything we use now. I'm the last guy to overstate our level of neuroscientific understanding (my disappointment with it is why I left the field) but we understand pretty well how individual neurons interact with each other on a physical basis: how they fire based on the signals they receive; how that firing affects the propensity of nearby neurons to fire; how relative firing time influences the strength of connections between neurons. It just doesn't look anything like a deep learning network for the reasons I gave above. Importantly, this isn't equivalent to Chomsky dismissing computational linguistics: Chomsky deliberately made his field entirely theoretical and explicitly dismissed any attempts to look at real languages or neural patterns, so when he was beaten on a theoretical level he got the boot. In comparison, the physical basics of neuroscience (and ONLY the physical basics) are pretty well nailed down by experimental electrode measurements. You mention the existing models of backpropagation in biological circuits but AFAIK they're very clunky, can't actually be used to learn anything useful, and don't drop nicely out of what we know about actual neurons. It's just neuroscientists trying not to be left behind by the new hotness. I'll take a look at a cite if you have one handy, though, it's been a while.
  2. Next-token prediction does impressively well at mimicking human intelligence, especially in abstract intellectual areas where the availalbe data covers the space well. I think we can agree on this. LLMs perform very well on code, writing (ish), mathematics (apparently), legal (passed the bar exam), etc.
  3. Next-token prediction does less well at the generation of new knowledge or new thought and cannot yet be said to have replicated human intelligence. In general, I found that GPT 4 failed to perform well when asked to use topics from field A to assist me in thinking about field B. On a lot of subjects AI reflexively defaults to rephrasing blog posts rather than making a deeper analysis, even when guided or prompted. I am also not aware of any work where an LLM makes itself significantly more intelligent by self-play (as AlphaZero did), so I don't think we can regard it as close to proved that statistics 101 + compute alone is the secret to human intelligence. It might be! But at the moment I don't think you can defend the claim that it is.

I think other people have covered qualia and philosophical questions already, so I won't go there if you don't mind.

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