Do LLMs “think” in a similar way to humans? Or is it totally different?
Maybe it’s a good idea to listen to someone who publishes papers on this very subject, and is a professor of both philosophy and psychiatry and directs an Institute for Cognitive Science. That person is Dr. Chandra Sripada and his insights are fascinating.
Sean Carroll (interviewer, scientist and science communicator) says this interview made him lean towards the answer being “yes, they think like humans” whereas previously he favored the opposite view.
An interview with the Director of an Institute for Cognitive Science run by the University of Michigan. Who does not have a podcast, or anything to sell you, but has an honest opinion based on decades of research.
Something in this conversation is clearly very threatening to peoples’ worldview and self-image. It evinces an emotional, visceral response.
Their areas of expertise and research are not areas that offer insight into mechanisms of cognition, they are not a neurobiologist or a computer scientist involved in machine learning. Their high standing in related areas is being used to give credence to an argument that is no better than a gut feeling.
You also have no ideas what conflicts of interest exist here, there may be none or the professor could be heavily invested in LLM companies.
LLMs dont think and the “trains of thought” is just strapping a bunch of LLMs together to try and tidy up and correct if one of the models in the chain outputs nonsense which they are wont to do. They are useful tools, they don’t spontaneously generate output or request input. It’s a very complicated auto complete that is capable of generating plausible valid output (when considered by humans) to a given natural language input.