alt Hacker NewsI am saying that there is no categorical distinction to be made on functional grounds between artificial intelligence and brains.
You cannot say an AI model cannot be intelligent because it's a probability machine, when all available evidence points toward natural intelligence also being generated by probability machines (much more complex ones, called brains).
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This seems fine but things being the same "on functional grounds" is just one way things can be the same. Why should we privilege this framing as something definitive versus another conceivable one?
On functional grounds my bike has not a lot of distinction from a horse, but just, like, saying that doesn't tell me much about either. Or at least, it seems to leave out a lot of otherwise crucial details and differences..
What does it mean to you, this point of view? Are you truly coming from like a 20th century pragmatism point of view? Where what is most useful is what is right? Or are your trying to make a larger claim about nature? I think being clear about that would help focus your critique here.
But brains do much more than just predict tokens based on previously seen tokens. I think all the other things brains do are probably important for our intelligence.
So, LLM are just next token predictors, brains are next token predictors + many other things in addition, and that makes people still feel LLM are dumb even when they solve a lot of problems using tokens.