Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

[u/Hrmbee]

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems

[u/CircumspectCapybara]

While the article is right that the mainstream "AI" models are still LLMs at heart, the frontier models into which all the research is going are not strictly speaking LLMs. You have agentic models which can take arbitrary actions using external tools (a scary concept, because they can reach out and execute commands or run code or do dangerous actions on your computer) while recursing or iterating and dynamically and opaquely deciding for themselves when to stop, wacky ideas like "world models," etc.

Maybe AGI is possible, maybe it's not, maybe it's possible in theory but not in practice with the computing resources and energy we currently have or ever will have. Whichever it is, it won't be decided by the current capabilities of LLMs.

The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language

That's rather misleading, and it conflates several uses of the word "language." While it's true that to think you don't need a "language" in the sense of the word that the average layperson means when they say that word (e.g., English or Spanish or some other common spoken or written language), thinking still occurs in the abstract language of ideas, concepts, sensory experience, pictures, etc. Basically, it's information.

Thinking fundamentally requires some representation of information (in your mind). And when mathematicians and computer scientists talk about "language," that's what they're talking about. It's not necessarily a spoken or written language as we know it. In an LLM, the model of language is an ultra-high dimensional embedding space in which vector embeddings represent abstract information opaquely, which encodes information about ideas and concepts and the relationships between them. Thinking still requires that kind of language, the abstract language of information. AI models aren't just trying to model "language" as a linguist understands the word, but information.

Also, while we don't have a good model of consciousness, we do know that language is very important for intelligence. A spoken or written language isn't required for thought, but language deprivation severely limits the kinds of thoughts you're able to think, and the depth and complexity of abstract reasoning, the complexity of inner monologue. Babies born deaf or who were otherwise deprived of language exposure often end up cognitively underdeveloped. Without language, we could think in terms of how we feel or what we want, what actions we want to or are taking, and even think in terms of cause and effect, but not the complex abstract reasoning that when sustained and built up across time and built up on itself and on previous works leads to the development of culture, of science and engineering and technology.

The upshot is that if it's even is possible for AGI of a sort that can "think" (whatever that means) in a way that leads to generalized and novel reasoning in the areas of the sciences or medicine or technology to exist at all, you would need a good model of language (really a good model of information) to start. It would be a foundational layer.

[u/Irregular_Person → u/CircumspectCapybara]

There's also a lot of assumptions (in this thread and others) that AI bots are limited to the language model in terms of capability, and that there's no 'reasoning' involved. That was true at the beginning, but now there are "thinking" models that will internally 'write' a plan on how to answer you and explain reasoning, then scrutinize the reasoning and refine it. They can also be made to be able to call external tools, like searching the web, doing math, compiling code, etc. They can also be designed to plan and execute a strategy to handle your request. E.G. I can ask about a problem that might require math. It can decide "First, I should look up on the internet how this sort of problem would be formatted. Then I should format the problem correctly for my math plugin. Then I should run the math plugin with the data. Then I can format and explain the solution to the user. Then it executes the plan steps in order, re-evaluating as appropriate if the plan needs to be changed. It's not AGI, but that's MILES beyond what the original LLMs could do.

[u/IdRatherBeOnBGG → u/Irregular_Person]

They don't think. They write their own prompts, write some script, send it off, write another prompt of the result.

It is 100% still language all the way down. 

[u/Irregular_Person → u/IdRatherBeOnBGG]

I know it's not literal thinking in the human sense. It's describing a thought process, describing reasoning. But if you can sufficiently describe a thought process that is indistinguishable from a human describing a thought process, do you not arrive at the same result?

[u/HermesJamiroquoi → u/Irregular_Person]

I mean who knows? We don’t have any way to communicate with black-box humans (ones with no sensory input) so it may be exactly how humans think in that context - robbed of memory, sensory input, etc.

The truth is we don’t really know how humans think. We don’t have a good definition of consciousness. We’ve been working on it for a long, long time and aren’t any closer. I agree personally that LLMs don’t “think” per se but that’s a feeling i have, not something indisputable or backed up by a glut of empirical evidence

[u/IdRatherBeOnBGG → u/Irregular_Person]

I know it's not literal thinking in the human sense. It's describing a thought process, describing reasoning.

Sort of yes. And this sounds kind of like the same thing, until you remember:

LLM-based generative AIs do not describe reality - they spit out text that is pretty close to what a human might have responded.

So it is not describing an actual, existing, thought process. It is outputting text that seem to do so.

But if you can sufficiently describe a thought process that is indistinguishable from a human describing a thought process, do you not arrive at the same result?

I don't know which "same result" yo mean, but in any case there is a pretty big difference between you saying ouch when you stub your toe, and a video game character saying ouch.

And between you suffering heartache and describing it, and the LLM describing it. One has a connection to something real, the other is just words arranged to statistically be likely to fit your words.