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by coldtea 102 days ago
The way this thing "looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck" has nothing to do with the way a real duck "looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck".

Who cares, as long as the end results are close (or close enough for the uses they are put to)?

Besides, "has nothing to do with how the human brain works" is an overstatement.

"The term “predictive brain” depicts one of the most relevant concepts in cognitive neuroscience which emphasizes the importance of “looking into the future”, namely prediction, preparation, anticipation, prospection or expectations in various cognitive domains. Analogously, it has been suggested that predictive processing represents one of the fundamental principles of neural computations and that errors of prediction may be crucial for driving neural and cognitive processes as well as behavior."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2904053/

https://maxplanckneuroscience.org/our-brain-is-a-prediction-...

2 comments

But the end results aren’t actually close. That is why frontier LLMs don’t know you need to drive your car to the car wash (until they are inevitably fine-tuned on this specific failure mode). I don’t think there is much true generalization happening with these models - more a game of whack-a-mole all the way down.
The human doesn't just predict. It predicts based upon simulations that it runs. These LLMs do not work like this.
If you're able to predict, you're able to simulate.