Large language model AIs might seem smart on a surface level but they struggle to actually understand the real world and model it accurately, a new study finds.
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It’s a massive difference in scale. For one, before you even leave the womb you have millions of years of evolution shaping the initial structure of your brain. Then your “training” begins, but it’s infinitely richer than anything we’re giving to these LLMs. Sights, sounds, smells, feelings, so many that part of what your brain is learning is what it must ignore. You’re also benefitting from the interactivity of your environment, you can experiment with things and get feedback for what happens. As you get older and develop more skills, you can start integrating them together to do even more complex things, and the people around you will use their own incredible intelligence to specifically tailor your training to what you need as you learn and grow.
Meanwhile, an LLM is getting fed words, and learning how to predict the next word. It’s a pale shadow of the complex lives humans live. Words are one of the more powerful things we have for thinking and reasoning, so if you’re going to go all in on one skill, it’s a rich environment for learning and in theory the contents of all of humanity’s writing probably contains all the information necessary to recreate human intelligence, but our current technology doesn’t even come close to wringing every ounce of knowledge from the training sets.
I agree with this take, well formulated!