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DATA STORIES | LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Large Language Models: Our Best Working Model of the Human Mind?
What will AI teach us about us?
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Over the past few years Large Language Models (LLMs) have leapt into the public consciousness, captivating us with fluent essays, code snippets, and even poetry that can appear uncannily human. This sudden surge in AI capability begs the question: if a machine can compose prose or respond thoughtfully to our queries, to what extent is it genuinely thinking? In exploring how these models learn we are uncovering striking parallels with our own cognitive processes. Parallels that challenge long-held assumptions about what intelligence is and maybe what it means to be human.
So what are LLMs? And what will they teach us about us?
Geoff Hinton: The Biological Blueprint for AI
To understand LLMs it helps to return to a time when the field of artificial intelligence was headed in a very different direction. In the 1970s and 1980s, most AI researchers believed that intelligence would emerge from deterministic rules, that is defined logic, symbolic representations and formal reasoning systems…