LLMs are fundamentally different from human consciousness. It isn’t a problem of scale, but kind.
They are like your phone’s autocomplete, but very very good. But there’s no level of “very good” for autocomplete that makes it a human, or will give it sentience, or allow it to understand the words it is suggesting. It simply returns the next most-likely word in a response.
If we want computerized intelligence, LLMs are a dead end. They might be a good way for that intelligence to speak pretty sentences to us, but they will never be that themselves.
So for context, I am an applied mathematician, and I primarily work in neural computation. I have an essentially cursory knowledge of LLMs, their architecture, and the mathematics of how they work.
I hear this argument, that LLMs are glorified autocomplete and merely statistical inference machines and are therefore completely divorced from anything resembling human thought.
I feel the need to point out that not only is there no compelling evidence that any neural computation that humans do anything different from a statistical inference machine, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence that that is exactly what real, biological neural networks do.
Now, admittedly, real neurons and real neural networks are way more sophisticated than any deep learning network module, real neural networks are extremely recurrent and extremely nonlinear, with some neural circuits devoted to simply changing how other neural circuits process signals without actually processing said signals on their own. And in the case of humans, several orders of magnitude larger than even the largest LLM.
All that said, it boils down to an insanely powerful statistical machine.
There are questions of motivation and input: we all want to stay alive (ish), avoid pain, and have constant feedback from sensory organs while a LLM just produces what it was supposed to. But in an abstraction the ideas of wants and needs and rewards aren’t substantively different from prompts.
Anyway. I agree that modern AI is a poor substitute for real human intelligence, but the fundamental reason is a matter of complexity, not method.
Some reading:
Large scale neural recordings call for new insights to link brain and behavior
A unifying perspective on neural manifolds and circuits for cognition
a comparison of neuronal population dynamics measured with calcium imaging and electrophysiology
If you truly believe humans are simply autocompletion engines then I just don’t know what to tell you. I think most reasonable people would disagree with you.
Humans have actual thoughts and emotions; LLMs do not. The neural networks that LLMs use, while based conceptually in biological neural networks, are not biological neural networks. It is not a difference of complexity, but of kind.
Additionally, no matter how many statistics, CPU power, or data you give an LLM, it will not develop cognition because it is not designed to mimic cognition. It is designed to link words together. It does that and nothing more.
A dog is more sentient than an LLM in the same way that a human is more sentient than a toaster.
In a more diplomatic reading of your post, I’ll say this: Yes, I think humans are basically incredibly powerful autocomplete engines. The distinction is that an LLM has to autocomplete a single prompt at a time, with plenty of time between the prompt and response to consider the best result, while living animals are autocompleting a continuous and endless barrage of multimodal high resolution prompts and doing it quickly enough that we can manipulate the environment (prompt generator) to some level.
Yeah biocomputers are fucking wild and put silicates to shame. The issue I have is with considering biocomputation as something that fundamentally cannot be be done by any computational engine, and as far as neural computation is understood, it’s a really sophisticated statistical prediction machine
We all want to believe that humans, or indeed animals as a whole, have some secret special sauce that makes us fundamentally distinguishable from statistical algorithms that approximate a best fit function according to some cost metric, but the fact of the matter is we don’t.
There is no science to support the idea that biological neurons are particularly special, and there are reams and reams of papers suggestin that real neural cognition is little more than an extremely powerful statistical machine.
I don’t care about what “most reasonable people” think. “Most reasonable people” don’t have an opinion about the axiom of choice, or the existence of central pattern generators. That’s not to devalue them but their opinions on things this far outside of their expertise are worth about as much as my opinions on the concept of art. I am a professional in neural computation, and I put it to you to even hypothesize about how animal neural computation is fundamentally distinct from LLM computation.
Like I said, we are wildly more capable than GPT, because our hardware is wildly more complex than any ANN, but the fundamental computing strategy is not all that different.
I am picking up a hint of the autocompletion you describe, in your writing.
A chatbot has no use for that, it’s just there to mush through lots of data and produce some, it doesn’t have or should worry about its own existence.
It literally can’t worry about its own existence; it can’t worry about anything because it has no thoughts or feelings. Adding computational power will not miraculously change that.
Add some long term memory, bigger prompts, bigger model, interaction with the Web, etc. and you can build a much more powerful bit of software than what we have today, without even any real breakthrough on the AI side.
I agree this would be a very useful chatbot. But it is still not a toaster. Nor would it be conscious.
Suppose you were saying that about me. How would I prove you wrong? How could a thinking being express that it is actually sentient to meet your standards?
You seem unfamiliar with the concept of consciousness as an emergent property.
What if we dramatically reduce the cost of training - what if we add realtime feedback mechanisms as part of a perpetual model refinement process?
As far as I’m aware, we don’t know.
How are you so confident that your feelings are not simply a consequence of complexity?
It literally can’t worry about its own existence; it can’t worry about anything because it has no thoughts or feelings. Adding computational power will not miraculously change that.
Who cares? This has no real world practical usecase. Its thoughts are what it says, it doesn’t have a hidden layer of thoughts, which is quite frankly a feature to me. Whether it’s conscious or not has nothing to do with its level of functionality.
You’re guessing, you don’t actually know that for sure, it seems intuitively correct, but we simply do not know enough about cognition to make that assumption.
Perhaps our ability to reason exclusively comes from our ability to predict, and by scaling up the ability to predict, we become more and more able to reason.
These are guesses, all we have now are guesses, you can say “it doesn’t reason” and “it’s just autocorrect” all you want, but if that were the case why did scaling it up eventually enable it to perform basic math? Why did scaling it up improve its ability to problemsolve significantly (gpt3 vs gpt4), there’s so many unknowns in this field, to just say “nah, can’t be, it works differently from us” doesn’t mean it can’t do the same things as us given enough scale.
I’m not guessing. When I say it’s a difference of kind, I really did mean that. There is no cognition here; and we know enough about cognition to say that LLMs are not performing anything like it.
Believing LLMs will eventually perform cognition with enough hardware is like saying, “if we throw enough hardware at a calculator, it will eventually become alive.” Even if you throw all the hardware in the world at it, there is no emergent property of a calculator that would create sentience. So too LLMs, which really are just calculators that can speak English. But just like calculators they have no conception of what English is and they do not think in any way, and never will.
I’m not guessing. When I say it’s a difference of kind, I really did mean that. There is no cognition here; and we know enough about cognition to say that LLMs are not performing anything like it.
We do not know that, I challenge you to find a source for that, in fact, i’ve seen sources showing the opposite, they seem to reason in tokens, for example, LLM’s perform significantly better at tasks when asked to give a step by step reasoned explanation, this indicates that they are doing a form of reasoning, and their reasoning is limited by what I have no better term for than laziness.
https://blog.research.google/2022/05/language-models-perform-reasoning-via.html
