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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

No, they're a "next character" predictor - like a really fancy version of the auto-complete on your phone - and when you feed it in a bunch of characters (eg. a prompt), you're basically pre-selecting a chunk of the prediction. So to get multiple characters out, you literally loop through this process one character at a time.

I think this is a perfect example of why these things are confusing for people. People assume there's some level of "intelligence" in them, but they're just extremely advanced "forecasting" tools.

That said, newer models get some smarts where they can output "hidden" python code which will get run, and the result will get injecting into the response (eg. for graphs, math, web lookups, etc).

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How do you know you’re not an extremely advanced forecasting tool?

If you're trying to claim that humans are just advanced LLMs, then say it and justify it. Edgy quips are a cop out and not a respectful way to participate in technical discussions.

You can make a human do the same task as an LLM: given what you've received (or written) so far, output one character. You would be totally capable of intelligent communication like this (it's pretty much how I'm talking to you now), so just the method of generating characters isn't proof of whether you're intelligent or not, and it doesn't invalidate LLMs either.

This "LLMs are just fancy autocomplete so they're not intelligent" is just as bad an argument as saying "LLMs communicate with text instead of making noises by flapping their tongues so they're not intelligent". Sufficiently advanced autocomplete is indistinguishable from intelligence.

The question isn't whether LLMs can simulate human intelligence, I think that is well-established. Many aspects of human nature are a mystery, but a technology that by design produces random outputs based on a seed number does not meet the criteria of human intelligence.

Why? People also produce somewhat random outputs, so?

A lot of things are going to look the same when you aren't wearing your glasses. You don't even appear to be trying to describe these things in a realistic fashion. There is nothing of substance in this argument.

Look, let's say you have a black box that outputs one character at a time in a semi-random way and you don't know if there's a person sitting inside or if it's an LLM. How can you decide if it's intelligent or not?

I appreciate the philosophical direction you're trying to take this conversation, but I just don't find discussing the core subject matter in such an overly generalized manner to be stimulating.

The original argument by vineyardmike was "LLMs are a next character predictor, therefore they are not intelligent". I'm saying that as a human you can restrict yourself to a being a next character predictor, yet you can still communicate intelligently. What part do you disagree with?

I'm not sure what point you think you are making by arguing with the worst possible interpretations of our comments. Clearly intelligence refers to more than just being able to put unicode to paper in this context. The subject matter of this thread was a LLM's inability to perform basic tasks involving analytical reasoning.

No, that's shifting the goalposts. The original claim was that LLMs cannot possibly be intelligent due to some detail of how they output the result ("smarter autocorrect").

> I'm saying that as a human you can restrict yourself to a being a next character predictor

A smart entity being able to emulate a dumber entity doesn't support in any way that the dumber entity is also smart.

Sure, but the original argument was that next-character-prediction implies lack of intelligence, which is clearly not true when a human is doing it.

That doesn't mean LLMs are intelligent, just that you can't claim they're unintelligent just because they generate one character at a time.

You're not emulating anything. If you're communicating with someone, you go piece by piece. Even thoughts are piece by piece.

Yeah, I am writing word by word, but I am not predicting the next word I thought about what I wanted to respond and am now generating the text to communicate that response, I didn't think by trying to predict what I myself would write to this question.

Your brain is undergoing some process and outputting the next word which has some reasonable statistical distribution. You're not consciously thinking about "hmm what word do I put so it's not just random gibberish" but as a whole you're doing the same thing.

From my point of view as someone reading the comment I can't tell if it's written by an LLM or not, so I can't use that to conclude if you're intelligent or not.

"Your brain is undergoing some process and outputting the next word which has some reasonable statistical distribution. You're not consciously thinking about "hmm what word do I put so it's not just random gibberish" but as a whole you're doing the same thing.

From my point of view as someone reading the comment I can't tell if it's written by an LLM or not, so I can't use that to conclude if you're intelligent or not."

There is no scientific evidence that LLMs are a close approximation to the human brain in any literal sense. It is uncouth to critique people on the basis of what appears to be nothing more than an analogy.

> There is no scientific evidence that LLMs are a close approximation to the human brain in any literal sense

Since we don't really understand the brain that well that's not surprising

> There is no scientific evidence that LLMs are a close approximation to the human brain in any literal sense.

I never said that, just that as a black box system that generates words it doesn't matter if it's similar or not.

I am definitely not making this claim. I was replying to this:

> People assume there's some level of "intelligence" in them, but they're just extremely advanced "forecasting" tools.

My question wasn't meant as a quip. Rather it was literal-- how do you know your intelligence capabilities aren't "just extremely advanced forecasting"? We don't know for sure, and the answer is far from obvious. That doesn't mean humans are advanced LLMs-- we feel emotions, for instance. My comment was restricted to intelligence specifically.

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