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Comment by xedrac | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that human learning is not all that different from machines training on data. We are all regurgitation our own experiences and knowledge to some degree. We certainly have things that machines don't, but LLMs can definitely come up with novel things that were not in the training data.

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There are a number of bad arguments people can make by removing as much information as possible until the two things resemble each other. The ability to make a bad argument shouldn't be used as an inspiration for your own

> We are all regurgitation our own experiences and knowledge to some degree

Feel free to debase yourself but leave the rest of us out of it. This flagellation done by non-experts has to be the saddest part of the llm craze these past few years. The eager willingness to paint yourself as no more than a machine pointed at a problem is a sign of the times.

LLMs don't have experiences, they have training data + test time compute. The only similarities to be found require stripping away all nuance and meaning from a conversation. Refusing to seed purely biological concepts to machines, such as experiences or emotions, does not make LLMs less impressive or less useful. If anything, it makes them more interesting

Yeah when someone asks "how was your day?" I say "good" because thats the next token in the sequence

How we interact with society is based on our "training"

If you really view yourself this way, I truly pity you.

What's the alternative? Being deliberately "quirky" or difficult, just to buck societal norms? Society is a set of expectations about behaviors and mannerisms that functions as reinforcement learning.

Shocking that humans are able to exist and not know this is how they work. Or maybe they made up their own purely rational language and I, grounded in the millennia of human culture distilled down thru my childhood, no longer perceive these True Unique Individuals.

I will say on a personal note: that believing one is Special and Unique, for me, is the residual of my childhood belief that the abuse I suffered gave me something Unique and Special; that belief removed the horror of it from my awareness, till I grew up and learned how to cherish the warm connectedness that is the ordinary birthright of humans. We need each other: for language, thought, context and motivation. while we all expressing different gifts and views of reality, we are all in the same existential boat. Whether ideas are generated by rolling dice, an LLM, mishearing a colleagues statement, a walk around the grassy park while mulling things over, the key thing is recognizing the value of the argument for the importance it can have. Part of that recognition takes place in the human body/brain, as one recognizes that the idea is excitingly apropos to such and such a context, and part of it takes place in the group dynamic, sharing, resharing, and discussing the value of the new idea. An LLM showing creativity is no diss on humans, any more than accidentally poisoning a bacterial culture with fungus, nor mishearing something mundane as something profoundly useful.

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