[echoangle]

I don’t understand the standard of modeling you seem to assume.

Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive if your model is abstract enough.

When I say „a neural network models a human brain“, I’m talking about the high level concept, not the specific structure of a human brain compared to other brains. You could also say that it models a dogs brain if you wanted to. It’s just the general working principle that is kind of similar. Does that not count as a model to you?

Edit: Here’s a simple example: I would say that a simple SIR model „models COVID infection in humans“. But that doesn’t mean it can’t also model Pig Flu in Pigs. It’s a very abstract model so it applies to a lot of situations, just like a neural network basically models the brain of every reasonably advanced animal.

[benlivengood]

I think a lot of people don't abstract their brain model when they say "models a human brain", or they'd say "models biological intelligence", etc. Specifically, I don't think there are any human traits in LLMs other than having mostly been trained on human outputs. They see tokens and predict tokens; very different sensorium from humans. There aren't any specific corvid or cephalopod traits either afaik.

Biological brains don't use gradient descent and don't seem to use 1-hot encoding/decoding for the most part.

[echoangle]

Pointing out differences doesn’t mean it’s not a model, that’s what makes it a model and not a replica. Saying „A neural network is a model of the human brain“ doesn’t imply that it’s a direct simulation of the structure and scale of a human brain, it just means that the neural network is based on a simplification of how neurons in a brain work. That’s the entire claim.

[lostmsu]

How about "hallucinations"? They are exactly what students produce during exams when they don't exactly know the subject: plausible sounding but internally incoherent sentences.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive

Take an existing implementation, ChatGPT4 or whatever - is it closer to a brain of a rat or of Albert Einstein?

If you are not sure, then, we, it’s just have some sort of intelligence, not ‘model of a human brain’.

I would wager it’s closer to a rat.

Also the phrase implies that we understand the difference between human brain vs brain of an elephant. For some reason humans are more capable, it’s not just size. At the moment we don’t understand.

[echoangle]

It’s probably closest to modeling a housefly, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a model of a human brain. Being a model doesn’t require that it exactly captures every aspect and scale, it means that it tries to approximate the working principle. Just like a SIR model doesn’t really model how an infection in an organism works, but it still models infection behavior of COVID between humans.