[tim333]

It's not the main driver of what's happening but it's an aspect of it that goes back a way. For example Turing writing in 1946:

>I am more interested in the possibility of producing models of the action of the brain than in the applications to practical computing...although the brain may in fact operate by changing its neuron circuits by the growth of axons and dendrites, we could nevertheless make a model... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unorganized_machine

[chunkmonke99]

Oh man I was not aware of this aspect of Turing's work thank you for sharing!!

Honestly, trying to reverse engineering something to understand how it works is interesting and potentially worthwhile! To me it's obvious that "broadly mechanistic" or causal explanations of specific cognitive functions can be created. I am not doubting that a "machine" can mimic human cognitive abilities -insofar as we can state them or "tokenize" them precisely. I am pretty sure that is the whole basis of Cognitive Science.

But just because we can mimic those capacities: does that imply that those are the same mechanisms that exist in nature? Herbert Simon made a distinction between "Natural" and "artificial" system: an LLM's function is to model language (and they do a damn good job of that!) does the brain have one function and what is it? If you build a submarine does that mean it tells you something about how fish swim? Even if it swims faster than any of the fish?

[tim333]

Building models can help you understand things. Maybe not so much submarines but building model aircraft and studying aerodynamics definitely helps understand how birds fly.

Artificial neural networks are already helping some understanding of brains for example there was a lot of debate about "universal grammar":

>humans possess an innate, biological predisposition for language acquisition, including a "Language Acquisition Device"...

and it now seems to be demonstrated that LLM like neural networks are quite good at picking up language without an 'acquisition device' beyond the general network.

[chunkmonke99]

That is a fair point. I do not disagree that building (tenuous at best) models of Neurons can help inform science and engineering and vice-versa. Much of "classic" digital signal processing and image processing was an interplay between psychologist, engineers, neuroscientists etc.. So that is very useful! But what it we have here is mistaking the airplane for the bird! My pet Parrot doesn't have an engine! The map is not the territory as it is said.

The point of this thread and the paper isn't that cognition is not an important goal to understand nor that it isn't computational (computation seems to be the best model we currently have). But that AGI is (as the previous comment mentioned) a Marketing term of little scientific value. It is too vague and has the baggage of some religious belief than cold hard scientific inquiry. It used to just be called "AI" or as was being debated at the infancy of the field just "complex information processing". The current for-profit (let's be clear OpenAI is not really a charity) companies don't really actually care about understanding anything ... to an outsider they appear to maximize hype to drum up investment so that they could build a God, while some people get very very rich. To many in these communities, intelligence is some magical quantity that can "solve everything!" I am not sure which part of those beliefs are scientific? Why are we ear marking $100s of billions (some of which is public money) to benefit these companies?

>humans possess an innate, biological predisposition for language acquisition, including a "Language Acquisition Device"...

Would you say that one day someone just happened to find an LLM chilling under the sun and we spoke some words to it for like a few years by pointing to things and one day it was speaking full sentences and asking about the world? Or is it that a lot of engineering work was put into specifically design something for the purpose of generating text ... Do you think humans were designed to speak or to be intelligent and by whom? Can Dolphins, Gorilla's, and Elephants also speak language? They have complex brains with a lot of neurons. Chomsky’s point was just that “If Human then can speak language” so “not human can speak language” doesn’t refute the central point. I am no expert on Chomsky you may know much more about that. But again doesn’t seem relevant to the actual thread.

[chunkmonke99]

So TLDR: I am not sure we learned a lot about how humans learn language with LLMs: all we learned as that it can be done by "something" but we already knew that. These specific technologies are Products designed to sell things and they need that hype for that. But it doesn't take away from the fact that they are freaking cool!

https://leon.bottou.org/news/two_lessons_from_iclr_2025