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by chpatrick 297 days ago
That's not what I said. What I said is that the claim "LLMs aren't intelligent because they stochastically produce characters" doesn't hold because humans do that too even if they're intelligent and authorative.
1 comments

We don't actually know how human cognition works, so how do you know that humans "stochastically produce characters?"
Do humans always answer exactly the same way to the same question? No.

Also you could always pick the most likely token in an LLM as well to make it deterministic if you really wanted.

That doesn't really prove anything. I could create a Markov chain with a random seed that doesn't always answer the same question the same way, but that doesn't prove the human brain works like a Markov chain with a random seed.

One thing humans tend not to do is confabulate entirely to the degree that LLMs do. When humans do so, it's considered a mental illness. Simply saying the same thing in a different way is not the same as randomly randomly syntactically correct nonsense. Most humans will not, now and then, answer that 2 + 2 = 5, or that the sun rises in the southeast.

I'm not making any claim about how the human brain works. The only thing I'm saying is that humans also produce somewhat randomized output for the same question, which is pretty uncontroversial I think. That doesn't mean they're unintelligent. Same for LLMs.
I really wish people into LLMs would limit themselves to terms from neuroscience or philosophy when descrbing humans.

You are in my mind rightfully getting pushback for writing "human experts also output tokens with some statistical distribution. "

That's just a mathematical fact.

You have a big opaque box with a slot where you can put text in and you can see text come out. The text that comes out follows some statistical distribution (obviously), and isn't always the same.

Can you decide just from that if there's an LLM or a human sitting inside the box? No. So you can't make conclusions about whether the box as a system is intelligent just because it outputs characters in a stochastic manner according to some distribution.