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Comment by jatora | Hacker News Reader

Humans are just baby replicators. The civilizations are what's getting uncanny.

It's good the 'just token predictors' crowd is starting to pivot and hedge though lol. 'It's just the harness!' uh huh. give it a couple more months and you'll be in here regurgitatin' Gordon Wood

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Baby replication (creation, actually, I don't think anyone has ever copied a baby) is not what humans do as their only function that enables them to do anything in life.

LLMs are literally token predictors. You can debate over the "just", but we haven't moved onto some new text generation technology, we're just expanding that one. I don't understand why you'd scoff at facts.

I think a better angle is that LLMs are "just" token predictors in the same way that we are "just" made out of atoms. A lot of people do not believe consciousness can be material; they don't believe that you could build conscious beings just out of normal matter, without an immaterial "soul". Whereas if you think that physical matter is a lot, actually, and you can build a nearly infinite variety of things out of these building blocks... well, why not consciousness?

Predicting the next token is an immensely powerful thing. You can encode basically anything into a sequence of tokens, any configuration of matter. If you have a perfect next token predictor, you can predict basically anything. You can simulate an entire universe. It's Turing-complete. It sounds diminutive, but it's a general paradigm. Given everything this paradigm appears to be capable of, well, why not consciousness, really?

Yours is exactly the right intuition imo.

If you presuppose certain key aspects of materialism, non-dualism, functionalism, objectivism, perhaps absolute determinism... and then layer on a good general grasp of neurobiology, chemistry, cosmology, physics, computer science, evolutionary biology, and psychology... I think the conclusions you have stated are inevitable.

Humans are "just" atoms. Humans are "just" the sum of trillions of living cells going about automatic/reactionary processes, culminating in a buzzing cacophony of activity that gives rise to what we perceive as consciousness and free will.

Oh so you're saying the biological imperative that underlies all human function, upon which all other emergent functions have sprung from, isn't actually the correct way to characterize human capability and is over-reductive..and strange?

Agreed.

Now just take that one extra logical step please

You picked a really bad analogy is what I'm saying. We're not debating imperatives, we're talking about ways of interacting with the world. From what I can see, humans have more ways to interact with the world around them than by giving birth. LLMs literally by their design output the next token, it is their only purpose and function as an algorithm. Of course it's more nuanced than that if you really want to get deep into LLM design, but denying that LLMs are ultimately a token predictor is like denying that cars are ultimately people/thing transporters because they're complex and have countless side features not related to transporting things.

Youre just arguing against your own point now. My analogy is a fine reproduction of the failure of the 'just a token predictor' argument. To predict the next token requires many other interesting things to also be understood and modelled internally. Same for baby production in humans.

Baby replication is one thing humans might do.

Word fragment generation is the one-and-only thing llms have ever done.

I think you can similarly reduce humans. For example, all humans do is contract muscles. This doesn't fully cover all of biology, such as replicating cells, etc. so not exactly comprehensive, but hopefully that helps get the idea across.

LLMS: Receive text/binary input, process it, and output text/binary input Humans: Receive various inputs, process them, and output muscle contractions

You're quoting Good Will Hunting... Is there anyone among us willing to get up on a desk and quote "O captain my captain", too? My sweet summer child, just because it maintains your 2000+ dependency filled codebase for you, it doesn't mean it can ever hope to master the mysteries of the universe.

Glad someone caught the reference. Too bad that someone completely whooshed the joke lol. And I don't need my LLM's to master the universe, just to be better than most humans at what I need done. Almost there.

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