alt Hacker NewsI think we can compare the human brain and LLMs on a bunch of capabilities today, and see how we compare. By my reckoning:
- LLMs have better long term memory (they know more than any human) and more working memory (LLMs have fast, uniform access to their whole context window).
- LLMs are faster than we are.
- Humans have online learning (we can do simultaneous learning and inference), giving us advantages in many novel tasks.
- We can learn concepts from far less data. And we can manage our mental context more smoothly.
- We seem to have better world models than current models. AI video just doesn't look right, somehow.
I expect that these remaining weaknesses can be overcome without resorting to human brain emulation. I see no reason to think that current LLMs are at the limit of what technology is capable of.
Because LLMs don't understand anything. That's the tech. They can only predict what they have been trained with and fail daily at the most basic tasks. Granted they can do amazing things, no question there. But they are not "smart".
For example, it seems that even at Fable scale, simple concepts like the passage of time or (gasp) timezones elude them. I live in UTC+10 and with any RFC8339 data LLMs are constantly confused - is it Sunday the 10th or Sunday the 9th, etc. I have tried many solutions for this and every time it finds a way to get it wrong.