The following is a satire of trendy articles explaining that deep neural nets such as LLM's are "just" predicting the next token, as if it were some sort of grand philosophical insight.
Interviewer: The human brain has captivated the masses. A lot of people are thinking it exhibits true intelligence. What are your thoughts?
Expert Bob: Well, it can certainly seem that way, to be sure. But if you're familiar with how the human brain actually works, you'll know it's just a façade.
Interviewer: Can you explain to us how it works?
Expert Bob: Of course. What happens is there are input sensory neurons, taking in signals from the eyes, ears, nose, and skin. All these electrical signals get processed in the brain, which is at the end of the day just a giant network of neurons. Finally, the brain outputs some signals which get sent as muscle activations.
Interviewer: So you're saying all it does is predict the next best set of muscle activations?
Expert Bob: If you peer into the brain with a microscope or high-tech scanner, you can trace every electrical signal down to its physical causes. It's a very complex biological machine, but ultimately predictable and devoid of true intelligence.
Interviewer: What are your thoughts on the fact that they seem to be capable of reasoning about morality, long-term planning, object recognition, and other tasks thought to require intelligence?
Expert Bob: Imagine you are talking to a human, you ask the human a question about an image you showed them. They respond with a seemingly intelligent answer. You have to understand all their words are just the result of a clever series of muscle activations in their tongue, mouth, and larynx, timed correctly. Basically, the brain is a clever invention that's programmed only to answer a single question: "What is the next best muscle activation?"
Interviewer: So when the ears hear something, is the brain not hearing actual sound? When the eyes see something is it not seeing a real image?
Expert Bob: The brain takes sound waves as input, but it isn't hearing sounds. What's fed into the brain isn't sound; it's just encoded electrons and ions. When the eyes "see" a picture, it's not actually seeing an image the way we see it. It's passing it to the brain as a rapid-fire series of "on" or "off" voltages, similar to how a computer works.
Disclaimer: This piece of satire is not meant to claim that deep neural nets exhibit true consciousness or are as smart as human brains. Rather, I'm simply debunking the notion that you can prove something has absolutely no "true intelligence/understanding" just because it's programmed to predict the next word.
