[benlivengood]

Humans, too, would likely be nearly stateless if we took a point-in-time snapshot of them and repeatedly simulated them from that point on various short (4000ms, similar to 4000 tokens) sequences of nerve impulses.

Nevertheless the human would be acting intentionally (for in-distribution impulse patterns) for the brief period of simulation.

Fine-tuning and RLHF seem to impart more intentionality to the pure stateless models, as well; it's not the case that all texts the LLMs were pretrained on were outputs of helpful AI assistants avoiding harmful outputs but the resulting models do in fact behave like AI assistants unless prompted with more out-of-distribution context or intentional jailbreaks.

What word would you use instead of intention for the property that RLHF and fine-tuning create? It's goal oriented behavior with some world-modeling ability in achieving the goal even if it's far from robust. If the LLM is only simulating an AI assistant it seems to me that a larger fraction of its total function is dedicated to simulating the intention of that assistant. Creating a simulator of intentional behavior is, I think, entirely novel.

[littlestymaar]

> Humans, too, would likely be nearly stateless if we took a point-in-time snapshot of them and repeatedly simulated them from that point on various short (4000ms, similar to 4000 tokens) sequences of nerve impulses.

“Humans too would be stateless if we hacked their brain in a way that made them stateless” that would also make them non-human though, and unlikely to be able to exhibit meaningful high-level cognitive abilities, so I don't really understand what your point is…

[user_named]

No.

[sjnair96]

I may be missing something, but I'm willing to bet it's just you. I had the same line of reasoning as him and your snarky comment without explanation is unwelcome here. I like discourse. Not emotional knee jerk reactions or whatever it is that caused you to reply like that. If there is something fundamentally wrong, and obviously so with his line of reasoning, do let me know.

[simplify]

> Humans, too, would likely be nearly stateless if we took a point-in-time snapshot...

I highly doubt that would ever be possible in practice, as our inputs are much too complex. But I want to point out, you're basically saying here "humans are nearly stateless if we take a snapshot of their state and simulate that state..."

[x-complexity]

> I highly doubt that would ever be possible in practice, as our inputs are much too complex. But I want to point out, you're basically saying here "humans are nearly stateless if we take a snapshot of their state and simulate that state..."

1) We don't have infinite inputs

2) We (our brains) don't have infinite processing

3) We (our brains) don't have infinite lossless storage: Our brains often perform pruning of unimportant information.

Given that there is an ultimately finite upper bound of both # of inputs & processing power & storage, at some point, the simulation of a human from a given snapshot is reductively possible.