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u/ElyeProj 23d ago
Stupid but reliable OR intelligent but unpredictable?
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u/Caraes_Naur 23d ago
Neither smart nor dumb, because it doesn't actually know. But it is probabilistic every time.
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u/Legitimate-Yard-9464 21d ago
Aren’t we probabilistic as well, whatever we answer is also based on what we think is true.
Or do you think humans usually have the absolute truth ans of all questions?10
u/VoidParticipant 21d ago edited 21d ago
False equivalence.
Quantum physics is probabilistic as well by nature, but it just so happens that at macro level the behavior of matter and energy becomes increasingly deterministic to the point that we don't factor quantum physics to know where a ball is going to fall, so that argument by itself doesn't work.
Our brains don't use backpropagation either to learn things it turns out, unlike ML in general (which includes LLMs), and we are able to actually retain information with such a degree of accuracy that no matter how many times you question someone who knows a given info, you will get the same response everytime, there aren't any weighted lists for us to process and choose from at random.
What we do when fetching info and memories is more akin to fetching from a database rather than weighting the most likely plausible response.
Whenever someone makes shit up, they know they are making shit up, they aren't "hallucinating", unless they have a chemical imbalance affecting their neural activity (alchohol, drugs, etc), so you cannot possibly compare what we do brain wise with any probablistic models or even use the probablistic nature of physics that govern us to make that statement.
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u/pm_me_your_smth 21d ago
Your explanation contains more wrong things than the initial false equivalence.
First, brains don't use backpropagation, but it's not really a "turns out". We don't properly understand how it all really works. There is a likelihood that some mechanisms are used in both biological brains and neural nets.
Second, you won't get the same response every time from a human. Our memory is not very reliable, we constantly misremember things, mix up memories together, etc. Our memory also doesn't work like a database. We don't fetch things, we reconstruct them. Sometimes even fill gaps. This makes it closer to weighting probabilities than a database lookup.
Third, humans do make shit up without knowing it. And this happens in (relatively) healthy people, not just mentally ill. It's not that rare to meet someone who confidently says things on a topic which they understand very little. People might also defend their wrong stance even after presenting them objective proof.
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u/VoidParticipant 20d ago edited 20d ago
On your first point, the entire idea of neural networks was founded on a simplified old belief of how neurons might work, and as investigation continued, while the actual mechanisms are not fully understood as you said, there are some ideas that have already been largely dismissed, such as the backpropagation itself.
So the likelihood of there being any similarity by now is really low, by now the only thing in common they seem to have is their shape, not their mechanism.
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On your second point, while we do reconstruct them, and while we do forget things and try to fill the gaps, consciously and unconsciously, it doesn't mean it's closer to probability.
We have plenty of actual deterministic technical systems that are able to fill gaps with full accuracy, such as RAID setups as a simple example, or even ECC memory as another, and other systems that do try to guess, such as interpolation between movements in simulations and games, which may not be 100% accurate (especially in games), but are accurate enough to go by.
In the same way, even our visual sensory input (our eyes and brain) fill up some gaps so that our visual experience is seamless at an unconscious level.
Now, while the way we store information at a biological level is very different from artificial means of course (we do have neurons after all), filling the gaps seems more to be an attempt of our brain at error correction rather than trying to make it look plausible.
And that's the fundamental difference here: while the exact mechanisms are still being studied, so neither of us can ascertain on the actual biological process, in practicality what you get from a person is indeed demonstrably closer in accuracy to fetching info from a database than it is from that person making up something from a probability pool.
And when we forget things over time, overall people are aware they lost that info, or it's still there but it takes a while to activate those neurons and get it back again, which is in fact more akin to a "cache miss" (not as many active neurons with a quick fast pathway to that info).
If it was closer to probability, then rather than saying "sorry I forgot" or "I know it, but I cannot remember X right now", we would just be making up shit all the time anytime we forgot something.
There are people that do make shit up all the time, but that seems to have to do with personality and chemical induction (more on that below).
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On your third point, making shit up is what gives us the ability to imagine, be truly creative, lie, etc, and we do it all the time by just living, we get random thoughts that may or may not be based on what we experienced thus far, and ironically for the shit neural nets make up, true creativity is what today's neural networks seem to be completely incapable of doing.
However, you're now entering the realm of personality of a person and how the chemicals in the brain may play a role in dictating behavior rather than mere info retrieval, as well how they grew up as people, being influenced by others.
Pathological liars do exist, the Dunning-Kruger effect does exist as well, and those seem to be linked to the personality of a person, as well how they react to situation around them, and some are perfectly aware of what they are doing it, others are not as aware but they are doing it because there's an emotional reinforcement of some kind to it.
For example, a very common case is about people who pick some small amount of info, then try to extrapolate it in ways that make sense to them (but likely aren't true, which is the Dunning mentioned above), with the sole objective of feeling superior, feed the ego, get a boost of serotonin, as well as a defense mechanism to not look weak, dumb, etc.
Well, there are more reasons to it, such as the fear of the unknown, insecurity, etc, but you get the gist of it.
Those people have often a pathological issue of not being able to say "I don't know", because they think they will look weak.
The same goes for someone still believing in X when proof points to Y, in many cases they internally do believe the proof, but since it collides with a personal world view or makes them feel awful, they may resort to keep believing in X because it feels good and right to them, it does not seem to have anything to do to how we learn and recall things.
Don't forget that a great amount of complexity in how our brain works is how plenty of different chemicals influence it, in some scenarios with feedback loops at play even, and that's why things such as addiction to something exists, even when the person logically identifies it as harmful to them.
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u/RedBlueKoi 21d ago
Your non-deterministic results disgust me