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by traject_ 1179 days ago
There's no reason to believe that LLMs are necessarily similar to humans. Just think of flight; both birds and planes can fly despite being very different. It's understandable that because humans are our main reference for intelligence that we see LLMs speaking language as a proof of similarity but there's no concrete reason to assume that.
3 comments

Here is a cognitive experiment were chimpanzees perform better than humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKvX9PPmI-Q
There's something about watching other primates interact with screens that just feels so uncanny. It's an almost humbling experience, seeing how much they look like us tapping and scrolling. The only difference seems to be that we think we understand more of what we're looking at on the screen... but do we really?
> Do we really?

Yes. We do. Significantly more. It’s our only power. We aren’t stronger or faster or more vicious, we cannot fly or breed dozens of humans at a time or puke honey. We can’t swim the ocean depths or swing through the trees.

But we sure can think, understand and create. For better or worse.

I’m all for not underestimating animals. They are sentient like us.

But not at the cost of dismissing the human animal.

We have very good color eyesight, are unusually flexible when it comes to weather, are pretty omnivorous and disease resistant, and we're absolutely unbeatable endurance runners.

IIRC we actually smell as well as dogs too, if we get down to floor level.

Don't forget being able to throw accurately.
Or juggle.
> It’s our only power.

We're also pretty good long-distance runners.

Planes and birds do operate on the same principles though, but instead of power through propellers birds are powered via wings.

There's no reason to think an LLM would not work for a monkey. Even if it is a different structure than how things work in humans a parallel structure could offer more or less the same benefits.

Anyway I buy the whole LLM thing, consider a baby, they can't talk at all and only become coherent when you talk to eachother just about non stop for 2 or 3 years.

You are right, there’s no concrete reason why an Internet comment should be taken to heart, yet somehow we still do react emotionally to online content all day long.

I get excited, happy, sad, jealous, proud and a bunch of other stuff just seeing stuff on a screen.

Anyway, what is life’s concrete reason to be? Does everything need one to be considered valid?