Technology

Andrew Ng said artificial neural networks are like a “cartoon brain”, which I think is pretty apt. It’s cool that having billions of parameters (cartoon “synapses”) can result in emergent behavior where a machine can “reason”. That was the original idea from as far back as the 1940s, and now we have the compute and have found a transformer architecture that can achieve the original vision. Very cool indeed. What’s not cool is the tech bros turning the tech into a large scale game of blackjack.

We also share half of our DNA with bananas. Therefore, we are also siblings of bananas.

Doesn't load for me. I work with ANNs solving problems and compare it with animals doing a similar thing for my PhD. You can see a lot of similarities, and can model some animal behavior after it. However, even with the presence of similarities you can't completely say it thinks "the same", but you can say it is functionally equivalent: If you have two functions that give the same output for the same inputs, then they are the same function for that domain, same goes for brains.

Just to be clear, LLMs have some similar thinking patterns with what we know about the neural activity of animal brains, but I wouldn't say it is the same, and saying they think "like humans" is very subjective.

One thing that is easier to notice is that they struggle with problems that require some form of recursive thinking, which is something a human can do. They can't simply go back to correct their beliefs, once they spit something out it stays there, so they have to commit to it.

They made it think like a human

they think like a human

"we're right all along"

So can we now make them do all our chores without costing million dollars nor mandatory surveillance? I'm tired of these "this tech change everything" while it doesn't even change baby diaper. It's nice that it help with some science breakthrough but i'm also tired of looking at another AI generated cat video thinking it's real.

You can replace all the 'reasoning' steps from an LLMs output with "please wait" and it will still supply the same final answer. We think but LLMs just throw up connected bits of their training. Which was stolen from human reasoning in the first place. They are an illusion of thought at best and a malfunctioning search engine most of the time.