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0 pointschpatrick10mo ago0 comments

I'm not making any claim about how the human brain works. The only thing I'm saying is that humans also produce somewhat randomized output for the same question, which is pretty uncontroversial I think. That doesn't mean they're unintelligent. Same for LLMs.

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staticman210mo ago· 2 in thread

I really wish people into LLMs would limit themselves to terms from neuroscience or philosophy when descrbing humans.

You are in my mind rightfully getting pushback for writing "human experts also output tokens with some statistical distribution. "

chpatrickOP10mo ago

That's just a mathematical fact.

You have a big opaque box with a slot where you can put text in and you can see text come out. The text that comes out follows some statistical distribution (obviously), and isn't always the same.

Can you decide just from that if there's an LLM or a human sitting inside the box? No. So you can't make conclusions about whether the box as a system is intelligent just because it outputs characters in a stochastic manner according to some distribution.

staticman210mo ago

Okay... I objected to your use of the word token. Humans don't think in tokens or even write in tokens so obviously what you wrote is not a fact.

That shouldn't even be controversial, I don't think?

You wrote "The text that comes out follows some statistical distribution".

At the risk of being over my head here did you mean the text can be described statistically or "follows some statistical distribution". Are these two concepts the same thing? I don't think so.

A program by design follows some statistical distribution. A human is doing whatever electrochemical thing it's doing that can be described statistically after the fact.

Regardless my point was pretty simple, I know this will never happen but I wish tech people would drop this tech language when describing humans and adopt neuroscience language.

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