Excellent observation. In fact the language part of the brain is only a (albeit a rather large) portion of the brain (not nearly as large as visual processing though). And people who suffer brain damage which renders them unable to speak (or understand speech; which interestingly is a different portion; albeit close to each other) are still able to demonstrate intelligent behavior with ease.
In fact it is damage to the prefrontal cortex (which has nothing to do with speech) which is mostly correlated with a detriment in intelligent behavior (suspiciously also social behavior; a food for though in what we consider “intelligence”). Victims of lobotomy had their prefrontal cortex destroyed, and their injuries resulted in them loosing their personalities and loosing basic function as human beings, even though they were still able (but perhaps not always willing) to speak and comprehend speech.
I don’t think you have an ‘arithmetic’ part of your brain.
What you have that LLMs lack is a visual part of your brain - one which can instantly count quantities of objects up to about 7. That gives you tools that can be trained to do basic arithmetic operations. Although you have to be taught how to use that natural capability in your brain to solve arithmetic problems.
And of course for more complex things than simple arithmetic, you fall back on verbalized reasoning and association of facts (like multiplication tables) - which an LLM is capable of doing too.
Poor GPT though has only a one dimensional perceptual space - tokens and their embedding from start to end of its attention window - although who’s to say it doesn’t have some sense for ‘quantity’ of repeated patterns in that space too?
It statistically outputs the next probable value of text. There is a lot of math related text in the CommonCrawl (likely the biggest source of it's training). That is all the company who owns it claims that it does. There is no calculation, therefor no basic arithmetic being done correctly.
runarberg|2 years ago
In fact it is damage to the prefrontal cortex (which has nothing to do with speech) which is mostly correlated with a detriment in intelligent behavior (suspiciously also social behavior; a food for though in what we consider “intelligence”). Victims of lobotomy had their prefrontal cortex destroyed, and their injuries resulted in them loosing their personalities and loosing basic function as human beings, even though they were still able (but perhaps not always willing) to speak and comprehend speech.
jameshart|2 years ago
What you have that LLMs lack is a visual part of your brain - one which can instantly count quantities of objects up to about 7. That gives you tools that can be trained to do basic arithmetic operations. Although you have to be taught how to use that natural capability in your brain to solve arithmetic problems.
And of course for more complex things than simple arithmetic, you fall back on verbalized reasoning and association of facts (like multiplication tables) - which an LLM is capable of doing too.
Poor GPT though has only a one dimensional perceptual space - tokens and their embedding from start to end of its attention window - although who’s to say it doesn’t have some sense for ‘quantity’ of repeated patterns in that space too?
ravenstine|2 years ago
krainboltgreene|2 years ago
throwaway8503|2 years ago
77pt77|2 years ago
That has been my best analogy so far.
They'll never say I don't know and bullshit you into oblivion while never backtracking.