[lukeschlather]

Yes, strictly speaking, the model itself is stateless, but there are 600B parameters of state machine for frontier models that define which token to pick next. And that state machine is both incomprehensibly large and also of a similar magnitude in size to a human brain. (Probably, I'll grant it's possible it's smaller, but it's still quite large.)

I think my issue with the "don't anthropomorphize" is that it's unclear to me that the main difference between a human and an LLM isn't simply the inability for the LLM to rewrite its own model weights on the fly. (And I say "simply" but there's obviously nothing simple about it, and it might be possible already with current hardware, we just don't know how to do it.)

Even if we decide it is clearly different, this is still an incredibly large and dynamic system. "Stateless" or not, there's an incredible amount of state that is not comprehensible to me.

[jazzyjackson]

FWIW the number of parameters in a LLM is in the same ballpark as the number of nuerons in a human (roughly 80B) but neurons are not weights, they are kind of a nueral net unto themselves, stateful, adaptive, self modifying, a good variety of neurotransmitters (and their chemical analogs) aside from just voltage.

It's fun to think about just how fantastic a brain is, and how much wattage and data-center-scale we're throwing around trying to approximate its behavior. Mega-effecient and mega-dense. I'm bearish on AGI simply from an internetworking standpoint, the speed of light is hard to beat and until you can fit 80 billion interconnected cores in half a cubic foot you're just not going to get close to the responsiveness of reacting to the world in real time as biology manages to do. but that's a whole nother matter. I just wanted to pick apart that magnitude of parameters is not an altogether meaningful comparison :)

[jibal]

> it's unclear to me that the main difference between a human and an LLM isn't simply the inability for the LLM to rewrite its own model weights on the fly.

This is "simply" an acknowledgement of extreme ignorance of how human brains work.

[tdullien]

Fair, there is a lot that is incomprehensible to all of us. I wouldn't call it "state" as it's fixed, but that is a rather subtle point.

That said, would you anthropomorphize a meteorological simulation just because it contains lots and lots of constants that you don't understand well?

I'm pretty sure that recurrent dynamical systems pretty quickly become universal computers, but we are treating those that generate human language differently from others, and I don't quite see the difference.

[lukeschlather]

Meteorological simulations don't contain detailed state machines that are intended to encode how a human would behave in a specific situation.

And if it were just language, I would say, sure maybe this is more limited. But it seems like tensors can do a lot more than that. Poorly, but that may primarily be a hardware limitation. It also might be something about the way they work, but not something terribly different from what they are doing.

Also, I might talk about a meteorological simulation in terms of whatever it was intended to simulate.