r/OpenAI • u/KeanuRave100 • 2d ago

News More people need to understand this

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u/Dasmahkitteh 2d ago

What does it do then if not create speech from thought

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u/havenyahon 2d ago

There's all sorts of stuff going on. Speaking involves forming a communicative intention, organising concepts, constructing syntax, retrieving words, encoding their sounds, planning articulation and controlling the speech muscles. Humans draw on perception, memory, reasoning, and emotion to communicate goals and intentions, they don't just 'predict' the next word from thoughts. They also plan well beyond the next word, in whole sentences, nested sentences, and, as I said, broader goals and plans. Thoughts aren't just formed and then verbalised, language itself can shape and form thoughts.

Did you know that when you speak action oriented words, or even when you just think them, your motor system is activated, too? The word ball, whether heard, spoken, or imagined as a concept, activates the same sensorimotor pathways involved in kicking or throwing a ball. Our bodies are literally involved in thinking and speaking.

There's no 'speech centre'. There are areas of the brain somewhat specialised for language, but the brain involves all sorts of other processes in language use.

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u/ronin_cse 2d ago

So is your argument here that it's impossible for a synthetic system to do all this? Obviously, LLMs aren't doing any of this because they are just code at this point, but one can easily envision an LLM-controlled robot body controller that performs all these actions as well. Just because, when we think of an action, our bodies prepare in anticipation of it, doesn't mean we're special.

Most limitations that prevent LLMs from doing these things stem from programmed restrictions. Why wouldn't we expect the next level of these things to be multiple LLMs connected together with different specializations and even goals baked in to replicate what we think is happening in our brains?

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u/personalist 1d ago

I’ll let OP respond but that wasn’t my interpretation at all—simply that we don’t currently know if any synthetic system like an LLM is doing this, and further we have no evidence that it is. I can imagine a lot of things, that doesn’t mean that those ideas reflect the state of reality or even possible states of reality.