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0 pointsACCount374mo ago0 comments

That's like saying that a modern calculator and a mechanical arithmometer have very little in common.

Sure, the parts are all different, and the construction isn't even remotely similar. They just happen to be doing the same thing.

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omnimus4mo ago

But they just don't happen to be doing the same thing. People claiming otherwise have to first prove that we are comparing the same thing.

This whole strand of “inteligence is just a compression” may be possible but it's just as likely (if not a massively more likely) that compression is just a small piece or even not at all how biological inteligence works.

In your analogy it's more like comparing modern calculator to a book. They might have same answers but calculator gets to them through completely different process. The process is the key part. I think more people would be excited by a calculator that only counts till 99 than a super massive book that has all the math results ever produced by the human kind.

__loam3mo ago

Well put and captures my feelings on this

Antibabelic4mo ago

They are doing "the same thing" only from the point of view of function, which only makes sense from the point of view of the thing utilizing this function (e.g. a clerical worker that needs to add numbers quickly).

Otherwise, if "the parts are all different, and the construction isn't even remotely similar", how can the thing they're doing be "the same"? More importantly, how is it possible to make useful inferences about one based on the other if that's the case?

ACCount37OP4mo ago

The more you try to look into the LLM internals, the more similarities you find. Humanlike concepts, language-invariant circuits, abstract thinking, world models.

Mechanistic interpretability is struggling, of course. But what it found in the last 5 years is still enough to dispel a lot of the "LLMs are merely X" and "LLMs can't Y" myths - if you are up to date on the relevant research.

It's not just the outputs. The process is somewhat similar too. LLMs and humans both implement abstract thinking of some kind - much like calculators and arithmometers both implement addition.

Antibabelic4mo ago

Without a direct comparison to human internals (grounded in neurobiology, rather than intuition), it's hard to say how similar these similarities are, and if they're not simply a result of the transparency illusion (as Sydney Lamb defines it).

However, if you can point us to some specific reading on mechanistic interpretability that you think is relevant here, I would definitely appreciate it.

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omnimus4mo ago

But they just don't happen to be doing the same thing. People claiming otherwise have to first prove that we are comparing the same thing.

__loam3mo ago

Well put and captures my feelings on this

Antibabelic4mo ago

ACCount37OP4mo ago

The more you try to look into the LLM internals, the more similarities you find. Humanlike concepts, language-invariant circuits, abstract thinking, world models.

It's not just the outputs. The process is somewhat similar too. LLMs and humans both implement abstract thinking of some kind - much like calculators and arithmometers both implement addition.

Antibabelic4mo ago

However, if you can point us to some specific reading on mechanistic interpretability that you think is relevant here, I would definitely appreciate it.

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j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse