[fiso64]

>if you ask it to count the number of letters in a word it will cheerfully pump out the wrong answer ("there are thirteen letters in the word 'twelve'")

Not to be too blunt, but you seem to be talking out of your ass. I'm tired of the overly dismissive comments here on hackernews by people who didn't bother to do the bare minimum of research. LLMs do not work with individual characters, they use tokens (i.e multiple characters, or sometimes entire words).

[BaseballPhysics]

Wow, you... completely misunderstood the purpose of that example.

Seriously, slow down and read it again, all the way to the end of that sentence.

[fiso64]

Uh, no.. I don't believe I did. Asking it to count the letters in a word is like asking a human to listen for a 30kHz tone without them knowing that humans can't hear it. I'd expect a lot of false positives.

[bonsaibilly]

Which reinforces the point I was making. Stop trying to win an argument online and think for 5 seconds about what it means for the claim "the human brain is just an LLM" if you're arguing that an LLM is naturally ill-suited to this task human children can do without issue.

[fiso64]

>the human brain is just an LLM

Never have I said such a thing. Also, BPEs aren't a natural limitation of any transformer-based model, it's a trick to save compute for LLMs.

[BaseballPhysics]

So what is this supposed to mean?

> We have no good definition for what sentience is either; maybe our brain is word association shenanigans;

Sure sounds like you're suggesting the brain is an LLM to me, and I can't blame bonsaibilly for thinking that.

[fiso64]

Keeping track of different usernames is hard, and I can't blame you for confusing me with the other guy :)

snark aside, I think he does have a point - afaik, we don't know what intelligence is, so it's kinda hard to make any argument about fundamental differences between "true" intelligence and LLM intelligence. I do feel like there should be something else. I saw somebody describe their mind as consisting of a "babbler" and a "critic" (a GAN, basically). The LLM would be the babbler while the critic is not yet implemented, and this sounds intuitively right to me. Then again, my intuition could be completely wrong and we may be able to get to human level intelligence with further scaling. I haven't seen any solid counterarguments yet. And not even the biggest LLM believers are denying the fact that it's not exactly the same thing as a human brain, but the question is whether it captures the gist of it.

[anonzzzies]

Yep. It’s not called tokens for nothing.