Nicole Hennig
@nic221@techhub.social  ·  activity timestamp 5 months ago
Despite the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing LLMs (or mechanizing human intelligence) as we happily did throughout this essay, there is often valuable insight lurking in these analogies. Even if they are ultimately flawed (all models are wrong but some are useful). For instance, as we compare non-reasoning LLMs to oral minds and reasoning LLMs to literate minds, we come to better grips with both the limitations and possibilities of different kinds of human intelligence. Without writing, we were cognitively constrained in ways not unlike non-reasoning LLMs. We overcame the shortcomings of our interior mental processes by first relying on tricks like mnemonics and proverbs, and later by externalizing our thoughts in the form of writing. And those same tricks seem to work for LLMs too (for both similar and not-so-similar reasons).
Despite the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing LLMs (or mechanizing human intelligence) as we happily did throughout this essay, there is often valuable insight lurking in these analogies. Even if they are ultimately flawed (all models are wrong but some are useful). For instance, as we compare non-reasoning LLMs to oral minds and reasoning LLMs to literate minds, we come to better grips with both the limitations and possibilities of different kinds of human intelligence. Without writing, we were cognitively constrained in ways not unlike non-reasoning LLMs. We overcame the shortcomings of our interior mental processes by first relying on tricks like mnemonics and proverbs, and later by externalizing our thoughts in the form of writing. And those same tricks seem to work for LLMs too (for both similar and not-so-similar reasons).
Despite the pitfalls of anthropomorphizing LLMs (or mechanizing human intelligence) as we happily did throughout this essay, there is often valuable insight lurking in these analogies. Even if they are ultimately flawed (all models are wrong but some are useful). For instance, as we compare non-reasoning LLMs to oral minds and reasoning LLMs to literate minds, we come to better grips with both the limitations and possibilities of different kinds of human intelligence. Without writing, we were cognitively constrained in ways not unlike non-reasoning LLMs. We overcame the shortcomings of our interior mental processes by first relying on tricks like mnemonics and proverbs, and later by externalizing our thoughts in the form of writing. And those same tricks seem to work for LLMs too (for both similar and not-so-similar reasons).
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