this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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A statistical model strings a sentence together with a great big web of statistical weights, settling onto the next most probable word, one by one. People write with the intent to share a meaning. It is not the same.
That statistical (or "predictive", if we're gussying it up) model has no understanding in it - no more than any other programme. It's a physical chain reaction, a calculation that runs until the sums even out to a state of rest. Wipe the web of statistical weights clean, and re-weigh them so the sums spit out the colour of pixels in a JPEG rather than the content of a .txt document.
Hell, weigh the web at random and have it spit out nonsense numbers. It'll do that for as long as keep the programme up. It will never ask you why you took the meaning out of its task. The machine makes no distinction between the sort of calculation you run it -- people are what project meaning onto the blinking lights.
You could say the same thing about rewiring a human's neurons randomly. It's not the powerful argument you think it is.
We don't really know exactly how brains work. But when, say, Wernicke's area is damaged (but not Broca's area), then you can get people spouting meaningless but syntactically valid sentences that look a lot like autocorrect. So it could be that there's some part of our language process which is essentially no more or less powerful than an LLM.
Anyway, it turns out that you can do a lot with LLMs, and they can reason (insofar as they can produce logically valid chains of text, which is good enough). The takeaway for me is not that LLMs are really smart -- rather it's that the MVP of intelligence is a lot lower a bar than anyone was expecting.
Can you? One is editing a table of variables, the other is altering a brain by some magic hypothetical. Even if you could, the person you do it to is gonna be cross with you -- the programme, meanwhile, is still just a programme. People who've had damage to Wernicke's area are still attempting to communicate meaningful thoughts, just because the signal is scrambled doesn't mean the intent isn't still there.