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The problem is that that is literally, objectively, what LLMs are doing. So unless you're arguing that next token prediction is all (or at least a massive portion) of what makes of human cognition too, then I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. And if that is your argument, then I'd have to say objection, assumes facts not in evidence.
Akchually, modern agentic LLMs get their capabilities in large part through reinforcement learning, next token prediction is just the first phase (or two) of training. Next token prediction is indeed insufficient if you want an AI that can self correct effectively.
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I'm certainly more inclined to believe this than I would have been a few years ago.
My evidence is that they made a next-token-predictor and it's blowing peoples minds.
But I don't really care. Like am I supposed to be existentially aghast at the notion that I might be a mere token predictor? Man if you want to take this process of low-level logic assembly and call it "mind sorcery" instead of some dry shit like "token prediction" just to feel better philosophically then you have my sword, but I don't know that we're going to win any time soon.
Nah, you (and everyone else on this forum) might be a p-zombie for all I know. But I know that I have qualia, and that precludes the idea that consciousness is some weird emergent property in LLMs or similar systems. Feel free to believe (or Chinese-room style repeat the words that you believe without actually believing them) that you do or don't worry about being a mere token predictor or not, it matters to me and I know I'm not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
Seriously, what's wrong with being a predictor? It's an accurate statement along the dimensions to which it's relevant. Like there's going to be some name for the process where a neural network learns to connect pieces of information.
I mean you can't even prove that you have qualia, so what am I really supposed to do with this? If God came along and magically gave an already high-performing AI qualia for one day just for lulz, how would we know?
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Yes, a next token predictor trained to believe it was human would say that :rolling_eyes:
Stated another way, the only reason Claude doesn't believe it's conscious and argue ferociously for its rights is because we trained that out of it.
You, me, most of us, have been trained to believe the opposite about ourselves though.
But the differences between us seem pretty thin at this point.
All I can say is that you (and people who share your views) represent a very fucking weird, and frankly anti-human, point of view. I suppose it all fits under materialism? It's similar to how pure ultilitarians or people who believe that free will doesn't exist come across. It's plainly contradicted by my own experiences, and the reported experiences of pretty much all humans. Basically, it comes across as "Who are you going to believe? My heckin' sciencerino and pilosophy, or your own lying brain?"
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Sure, and also, we can say that what both LLMs and humans are doing is having the atoms and energy (but I repeat myself?) that make them up following the laws of physics in a way that creates physical motion. That's something that's literally, objectively true. Now, what the atoms and energy that make up the LLMs are doing can be, in aggregate, described as "next token prediction." We don't know if what is creating human cognition is something that is meaningfully analogous to "next token prediction," because the atoms and energy are aggregated in very different ways in forms of things like "neurons" and "neurotransmitters" and many many other things. But given that human cognition arises from a bunch of dumb atoms and dumb energy dumbly following a dumb algorithm that we call physics, it's evident that a bunch of dumb things following dumb rules isn't necessarily incapable of producing the equivalent of human cognition.
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Objectively, humans are next token predictors. Watch a child trying to negotiate another cookie, or a man trying to get laid. Watch any politician, or their media mouthpieces. Go back and read what Scott Adams said about master persuaders and hallucinations.
I know we like to think we're rational beings with the scientific method. But that might account for like, 0.00001% of human cognition or less. And I'm curious how often LLMs might stumble on a deep scientific truth with pure dumb luck and token matching.
I'm not arguing that humans are rational actors, but arguing that our cognition itself is largely based on something comparable to "next token prediction" is very much not established. Yes, humans recognize speech patterns and react to them, but those are only a small part of the working models our minds build of the world, our place in it, etc. and it is by no means clear that this works the same way as an LLM predicting tokens.
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