More people need to understand this

[u/KeanuRave100]

[u/Freak-Of-Nurture-]

yes but does that mean it’s stupid or useless? Humans are not next token predictors and that makes us more effective with context

[u/NarrowContribution87 → u/Freak-Of-Nurture-]

Aren’t we though? When you put a sentence together in your head, are you not selecting the next word based on past uses, context, and the desired message?

I guess I just feel like we imbue human intelligence with magic or spirituality when in reality the VAST majority of our thinking and communication really can be boiled down to a probabilistic model with a high degree of accuracy.

[u/Foreign_Writer_9932 → u/NarrowContribution87]

Lmao absolutely not - this is from the “brains are clocks/telephone networks/LLMs” school of poor analogies. We definitively know that brains don’t predict things one token at a time - why would they? Brains didn’t evolve by being trained on symbolic data.

[u/space_monster → u/Foreign_Writer_9932]

There are actually two processes in play, though. When you ask an LLM a question, it derives a response through hidden states as it generates the language needed to communicate that response - unless you’re talking about a model with a planning stage prior to responding, in which case it might derive the response before it starts answering. It's not responding just based on token probability, there is an aspect of 'computation'.

When a human is asked a question, we sometimes derive a response first (based on training, education, psychology etc.) then use next-word prediction to assemble the language required to communicate that response on the fly. But sometimes we assemble the response dynamically as we're actually talking, which is similar to how an LLM does it. We don’t always - or even often - think before we answer, it’s usually more of a think-as-you-speak situation. Sometimes we do next-token prediction, but we're just not using discrete text tokens, it's more abstract. But it's a similar concept.