LOL! Yes, we are not in the world of mechanical or electro-mechanical devices anymore, are we?
And yet I don’t think things are hopeless. Understanding LLMs is certainly no worse than understanding brains. After all, we can manipulate and inspect LLMs in a way we cannot manipulate and inspect brains. And I think we’ve made progress understanding brains. Back in the old days people used to believe in neurons that were facetiously called “grandmother cells.” The idea is that the was one neuron that recognized your grandmother, another one that recognized your dog Spot, yet another one for your Barbie doll, and so forth. I think the field has pretty much gotten over that fantasy to the idea of collective representation. Each neuron participates in recognizing many different things and each thing is recognized by a collectivity of neurons. Just how that might work, well, we’re working on it. I hear things might be like that inside LLMs as well.
LOL! Yes, we are not in the world of mechanical or electro-mechanical devices anymore, are we?
And yet I don’t think things are hopeless. Understanding LLMs is certainly no worse than understanding brains. After all, we can manipulate and inspect LLMs in a way we cannot manipulate and inspect brains. And I think we’ve made progress understanding brains. Back in the old days people used to believe in neurons that were facetiously called “grandmother cells.” The idea is that the was one neuron that recognized your grandmother, another one that recognized your dog Spot, yet another one for your Barbie doll, and so forth. I think the field has pretty much gotten over that fantasy to the idea of collective representation. Each neuron participates in recognizing many different things and each thing is recognized by a collectivity of neurons. Just how that might work, well, we’re working on it. I hear things might be like that inside LLMs as well.
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PS. I just looked at your profile and noticed that you have ADHD. Some years ago I took a look at the technical (and not so technical) literature on the subject and wrote up some notes: Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD: A Theoretical Perspective.