Do LLMs “think” in a similar way to humans? Or is it totally different?
Maybe it’s a good idea to listen to someone who publishes papers on this very subject, and is a professor of both philosophy and psychiatry and directs an Institute for Cognitive Science. That person is Dr. Chandra Sripada and his insights are fascinating.
Sean Carroll (interviewer, scientist and science communicator) says this interview made him lean towards the answer being “yes, they think like humans” whereas previously he favored the opposite view.
Doesn’t load for me. I work with ANNs solving problems and compare it with animals doing a similar thing for my PhD. You can see a lot of similarities, and can model some animal behavior after it. However, even with the presence of similarities you can’t completely say it thinks “the same”, but you can say it is functionally equivalent: If you have two functions that give the same output for the same inputs, then they are the same function for that domain, same goes for brains.
Just to be clear, LLMs have some similar thinking patterns with what we know about the neural activity of animal brains, but I wouldn’t say it is the same, and saying they think “like humans” is very subjective.
One thing that is easier to notice is that they struggle with problems that require some form of recursive thinking, which is something a human can do. They can’t simply go back to correct their beliefs, once they spit something out it stays there, so they have to commit to it.
Backtracking is a common and integral part of the reasoning learned by what used to be called Large Reasoning Models but today is part of almost any modern model design, much like Mixture-of-Experts