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0 pointsvisarga2y ago0 comments

There is no magic in the brain. There is no magic in LLMs. There is just new experience we gain by interacting with the environment and society. And there is the trove of past experience encoded in our books. We got smart by collecting experience, in other words, from outside. The magic in the brain was not in the brain, but everywhere else.

What is experience? We are in state S, and take action A, and observe feedback R. The environment is the teacher, giving us reward signals. We can only increase our knowledge incrementally, by trying our many bad ideas, and sometimes paying with our lives. But we still leave morsels of newly acquired experience for future generations.

We are experience machines, both individually and socially. And intelligence is the distilled experience of the past, encoded in concepts, methods and knowledge. Intelligence is a collective process. None of us could reach our current level without language and society.

Human language is in a way smarter than humans.

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crowbahr2y ago

To say there's no magic in the brain drastically *minimizes the complexity of the brain.

Your brain is several orders of magnitude more complex than even the largest LLM.

GPT4 has 1 trillion parameters? Big deal. Your brain has 1 quadrillion synapses, constantly shifting. Beyond that the synapses are analog messages, not binary. Each synapse is approximately like 1000 transistors based on the granularity of messaging it can send and receive.

It is temporally complex as well as structurally complex, well beyond anything we've ever made.

I'm strongly in favor of AGI, for what it's worth, but LLMs aren't even scratching the surface. They're nowhere close to a human. They're a mediocre pastiche and it's equally possible that they're a dead end as it is that they'll ever be AGI.

visargaOP2y ago

That kind of explains why humans need to absorb less language to train. It still takes 25 years of focused study to become capable of pushing the frontier of knowledge a tiny bit.

tomduncalf2y ago

Re: synapses being analog messages, isn’t this sort of true of neural networks? In my understanding, the weights, biases and values flowing through the network are floating point numbers so I’d argue closer to analog than binary.

crowbahr2y ago

You know that's a good point that I didn't consider in my comment. LLMs use 16bit floats, which is approximately the same number of values.

But then you get into the nuance of spiking vs non spiking neurons etc, which to my knowledge isn't emulated. The brain is extremely complex. I don't believe LLMs do anything similar to inhibitor neuronal function for example.

elktown2y ago

> There is no magic in the brain.

The amount of hubris we have in our field is deeply embarrassing. Imagine a neuroscientists reading that. The thought makes me blush.

lern_too_spel2y ago

Neuroscientists would agree with GP, otherwise they would be neuromystics instead of neuroscientists. There is no magic. It's all physical processes that we can eventually understand.

elktown2y ago

The entire point was that we do not understand it? That much of how the brain work is "magic" atm.

It's our field that are the alchemist mystics, rambling about AGI/Philosopher's Stone in ever increasingly unhinged ways, while stirring our ML-pots that we have never even tried to prove have a chance to be anymore successful than the alchemists.

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RaftPeople2y ago

> There is no magic in the brain.

Consciousness?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsvisarga2y ago0 comments

Human language is in a way smarter than humans.

0 comments

crowbahr2y ago

To say there's no magic in the brain drastically *minimizes the complexity of the brain.

Your brain is several orders of magnitude more complex than even the largest LLM.

It is temporally complex as well as structurally complex, well beyond anything we've ever made.

visargaOP2y ago

That kind of explains why humans need to absorb less language to train. It still takes 25 years of focused study to become capable of pushing the frontier of knowledge a tiny bit.

tomduncalf2y ago

crowbahr2y ago

You know that's a good point that I didn't consider in my comment. LLMs use 16bit floats, which is approximately the same number of values.

elktown2y ago

> There is no magic in the brain.

The amount of hubris we have in our field is deeply embarrassing. Imagine a neuroscientists reading that. The thought makes me blush.

lern_too_spel2y ago

Neuroscientists would agree with GP, otherwise they would be neuromystics instead of neuroscientists. There is no magic. It's all physical processes that we can eventually understand.

elktown2y ago

The entire point was that we do not understand it? That much of how the brain work is "magic" atm.

1 more reply

RaftPeople2y ago

> There is no magic in the brain.

Consciousness?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse