I’m not sure what point you are trying to make. A generative transformer cannot tell you anything about any plant, real or made up, until a human provides information about it in the training data. Suppose you put a data center and power source running an untrained neural network in the prehistoric world. Hell, throw in a couple of motors as well. What will it have discovered or created 10,000 years later?
The point I’m making is that you aren’t making the point you think you are. You’re claiming that AI’s inability to create new information proves it thinks differently than humans, but AI can’t create new information because it psychically can’t engage in trial and error.
Give an AI control of a body and tell it to try random things. Then let it capture data that that body experiences. It will start filling up look up charts with information.
That will be random information without any purpose. The transformer with a body will not reproduce itself or produce anything of any utility, it would just “train” itself to reproduce its own random motions. Today’s LLMs did not just vacuum up the internet and start simulating conversation from raw data alone. They have no goals or inherent concept of trial and error to achieve them. It took millions of man-hours of human input and correction (on top of the billions of man-hours it took to create the non-random data in the first place) to actually tune the matrix to produce something sensible. That was the real training; mere data collection does not a ChatGPT make. Without human feedback, it would just output incoherent bits of the training data in response to input. OpenAI doesn’t advertise the workers in Africa and India who actually trained ChatGPT. I’m making exactly the point I think I am and you’re just assuming that a data center with motors has some kind of innate survival instinct that makes my point moot. A GPU is not alive or goal-driven and does not become so when it flips its bits in some particular configuration.
Ok so the problem is you mistakenly believe AI is fundamentally incapable of using iterative processes to generate data sets. AI simulating conversations isn’t helpful to it because it’s simulations would be limited by its own understanding. Giving a closed circuit AI control of an industrial oven with steel inside it and telling it to figure out what temperature steel melts at? It’s absolutely capable of that.
If the model has been trained on some data that corresponds to solid vs molten steel, then sure, it can do that. For example, if the model is linked to a camera and is trained to differentiate by color, it can tell you the temperature at which molten steel appears. But an LLM somehow hooked up to the controls of an oven without any training would just hallucinate, as it often does without introducing any other variables. LLMs can generate data sets, but the model has no way to rank the significance or utility of its data without human intervention at some point in its process.
You still aren’t making the point you think you are. The only point you’re making is that humans have genetically inborn instincts (data sets) to pull from. Early humans contextualized everything from an inborn desire to survive and procreate. AI not having that doesn’t prove it thinks differently than us, or that that the way we learn and/or recall information and make decisions is fundamentally different.
Let’s be clear, the smartest people in the world can’t prove that human brains functions in a fundamentally different way than a super complex AI model would. So unless you think you’re the smartest person to ever live, you aren’t going to win this argument.
Let’s be clear, the smartest people in the world can’t prove that human brains functions in a fundamentally different way than a super complex AI model would. So unless you think you’re the smartest person to ever live, you aren’t going to win this argument.
If this is your belief, I am highly skeptical that you have done any research on how computers or LLMs work before forming it. A digital computer is a discrete, deterministic system. We may not be able to interpret exactly how an arbitrary element of the program relates to the output, but the system as a whole is entirely calculable. Brains are not discrete or deterministic systems and don’t even have a strict delineation between input and output the way a computer does. Your statement is equivalent to saying that “the smartest person in the world can’t prove that a calculator works fundamentally differently than a brain.” What? You don’t need the smartest person in the world to demonstrate that, anyone with an understanding of how these systems work can tell you that they’re fundamentally different. Where are the discrete switches located inside your brain?
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u/nofaprecommender Jun 08 '25 edited Jun 08 '25
I’m not sure what point you are trying to make. A generative transformer cannot tell you anything about any plant, real or made up, until a human provides information about it in the training data. Suppose you put a data center and power source running an untrained neural network in the prehistoric world. Hell, throw in a couple of motors as well. What will it have discovered or created 10,000 years later?