[wredue]

Hacker news is completely flooded with “AI learns just like humans do” and “AI models the human brain” despite neither of these things having any concrete evidence at all.

Unfortunately it isn’t just bosses being fooled by this. Scores of people push this crap.

I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these idiots are idiots.

[jknoepfler]

The reality on the ground (for me) has been refreshingly sane.

I work at a company with a substantial BI/ML footprint. Our head of research was tasked with evaluating the applicability of LLMs to either our product or our daily workflows.

To date the consensus is that there isn't much there for our product, that integrating LLMs into our models would introduce more problems than it would solve, and that we should cautiously experiment with allowing engineers to use tools like co-pilot, provided we take adequate steps to protect our IP.

It was a reasonable exercise carried out by a reasonable person for reasonable reasons (from my POV). I imagine this isn't an uncommon story? Color me pessimistically optimistic?

For practical reasons we need to have an answer to the buzzword bingo when communicating with customers/company ownership, and now we do. Now we don't talk much about it because there isn't much to talk about.

[eichin]

Refreshing but rare; usually this kind of eval gets done by someone excited to do it because they've already been "intellectually captured" by the hype.

[echoangle]

What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?

[binoct]

Neural networks are not a model of the working of the human brain. They are based on an extremely simplified approximation of how neurons connect and function (which while conceptually similar is a terrible predictive model for biological neurons) and are connected together in ways that have absolutely zero resemblance to how complex nervous systems look in real animals. The burden of proof here is absolutely on showing how LLMs can model the human brain.

[benlivengood]

One clear piece of evidence would be ruling out "AI models the corvid brain" or "AI models the cephalopod brain" which might narrow it toward the human brain.

That it's functionally impossible to do either leads me to believe that "it models some form of intelligence" is about the best we can prove.

[oneshtein]

IMHO, it's clear that no human can learn like AI. AI outperformed humans with huge margin in some areas already, while their performance is laughable in other areas.

Also, it's obvious that our brain is not built like AI models.

There are similarities between both human and current AI models, but there also huge differences, which doesn't allow easily map one to another.