[lucubratory]

We don't now for sure, which is why it's so interesting to research! There are some tantalising hints though, for example the OthelloGPT results (here: https://thegradient.pub/othello/) which show that LLMs can form internal world models and then use them in inference to make decisions. Another interesting result is this one (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03036-1), which shows that neuronal activations in some parts of the human brain linearly map to neuronal activations in deep learning models when they are both doing the same task; this doesn't tell us anything about how either is doing what they are doing, but it does suggest that the human brain and LLMs may be doing a similar thing to achieve the same end result. We definitely need a lot more research before we can say anything definitive about this question, but there are a bunch of useful research directions that AI and neuroscience researchers are pursuing.

[idkyall]

Some interesting follow-ups on OthelloGPT https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability/othell...

[lucubratory]

That was fascinating, thank you!

[joshspankit]

> neuronal activations in some parts of the human brain linearly map to...

Holy.shi..

As I have been observing the ways AI struggles and the ways it produces output, I’ve had this growing suspicion that LLMs have been somehow showing us things about the human brain, but it wasn’t until this moment that I had any validation of the theory.

[abecode]

If you think about the attention mechanism in LLMs, it may not work the same way as the brain, but there should be some functionality of the brain that also deals with attention. And if you think about that, you might also think that attention has some role in consciousness: you need to pay attention to things to be aware of them, and you need awareness of the self for consciousness, etc...