Multimodal large language models are shown to develop object concept representations similar to those of humans. These representations closely align with neural activity in brain regions involved in object recognition, revealing similarities between artificial intelligence and human cognition.
It’s a good thing in a sense that it means the models are creating stable representations of objects across modalities. It means that there is potential for extending LLM approach to building actual world models in the future.
The object concept representation is an emergent property within these networks. Basically, the network learns to create stable associations between different modalities and associate an abstract concept of an object that unites them together.
But it’s emerging from networks of data from humans, which means our object concept representation is in the data. This isn’t random data, after all, it comes from us. Seems like the LLMs are just regurgitating what we’re feeding them.
What this shows, I think, is how deeply we are influencing the data we feed to LLMs. They’re human-based models and so they produce human-like outputs.
Ultimately the data both human brains and artificial neural networks are trained on comes from the material reality we inhabit. That’s the underlying context. We’re feeding LLMs data about our reality encoded in a way that’s compatible with how our brains interpret it. I’d argue that models being based on data encoding that we ourselves use is a feature, because ultimately we want to be able to interact with them in a meaningful way.
LLMs are not getting raw data from nature. They’re being fed data produced by us and uploaded into their database: human writings and human observations and human categorizations and human judgements about what data is valuable. All the data about our reality that we feed them is from a human perspective.
This is a feature, and will make them more useful to us, but I’m just arguing that raw natural data won’t naturally produce human-like outputs. Instead, human inputs produce human-like outputs.
I didn’t say they’re encoding raw data from nature. I said they’re learning to interpret multimodal representations of the encodings of nature that we feed them in human compatible formats. What these networks are learning is to make associations between visual, auditory, tactile, and text representations of objects. When a model recognizes a particular modality such as a sound, it can then infer that it may be associated with a particular visual object, and so on.
Meanwhile, the human perspective itself isn’t arbitrary either. It’s a result of evolutionary selection process that shaped the way our brains are structured. This is similar to how brains of other animals encode reality as well. If you evolved a neural network on raw data from the environment, it would eventually start creating similar types of representations as well because it’s an efficient way to model the world.
I didn’t say they’re encoding raw data from nature
Ultimately the data both human brains and artificial neural networks are trained on comes from the material reality we inhabit.
Anyway, the data they are getting not only comes in a human format. The data we record is only recorded because we find meaningful as humans and most of the data is generated entirely by humans besides. You can’t separate these things; they’re human-like because they’re human-based.
It’s not merely natural. It’s human.
If you evolved a neural network on raw data from the environment, it would eventually start creating similar types of representations as well because it’s an efficient way to model the world.
We don’t know that.
We know that LLMs, when fed human-like inputs, produce human-like outputs. That’s it. That tells us more about LLMs and humans than it tells us about nature itself.
I’m not disputing this, but I also don’t see why that’s important. It’s a representation of the world encoded in a human format. We’re basically skipping a step of evolving a way to encode this data.
We know that LLMs, when fed human-like inputs, produce human-like outputs. That’s it. That tells us more about LLMs and humans than it tells us about nature itself.
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In your opinion, is this a good thing, a bad thing, or is it just a curiosity that LLMs currently have?
It’s a good thing in a sense that it means the models are creating stable representations of objects across modalities. It means that there is potential for extending LLM approach to building actual world models in the future.
Isn’t this just because LLMs use the object concept representation data from actual humans?
The object concept representation is an emergent property within these networks. Basically, the network learns to create stable associations between different modalities and associate an abstract concept of an object that unites them together.
But it’s emerging from networks of data from humans, which means our object concept representation is in the data. This isn’t random data, after all, it comes from us. Seems like the LLMs are just regurgitating what we’re feeding them.
What this shows, I think, is how deeply we are influencing the data we feed to LLMs. They’re human-based models and so they produce human-like outputs.
Ultimately the data both human brains and artificial neural networks are trained on comes from the material reality we inhabit. That’s the underlying context. We’re feeding LLMs data about our reality encoded in a way that’s compatible with how our brains interpret it. I’d argue that models being based on data encoding that we ourselves use is a feature, because ultimately we want to be able to interact with them in a meaningful way.
LLMs are not getting raw data from nature. They’re being fed data produced by us and uploaded into their database: human writings and human observations and human categorizations and human judgements about what data is valuable. All the data about our reality that we feed them is from a human perspective.
This is a feature, and will make them more useful to us, but I’m just arguing that raw natural data won’t naturally produce human-like outputs. Instead, human inputs produce human-like outputs.
I didn’t say they’re encoding raw data from nature. I said they’re learning to interpret multimodal representations of the encodings of nature that we feed them in human compatible formats. What these networks are learning is to make associations between visual, auditory, tactile, and text representations of objects. When a model recognizes a particular modality such as a sound, it can then infer that it may be associated with a particular visual object, and so on.
Meanwhile, the human perspective itself isn’t arbitrary either. It’s a result of evolutionary selection process that shaped the way our brains are structured. This is similar to how brains of other animals encode reality as well. If you evolved a neural network on raw data from the environment, it would eventually start creating similar types of representations as well because it’s an efficient way to model the world.
Anyway, the data they are getting not only comes in a human format. The data we record is only recorded because we find meaningful as humans and most of the data is generated entirely by humans besides. You can’t separate these things; they’re human-like because they’re human-based.
It’s not merely natural. It’s human.
We don’t know that.
We know that LLMs, when fed human-like inputs, produce human-like outputs. That’s it. That tells us more about LLMs and humans than it tells us about nature itself.
I’m not disputing this, but I also don’t see why that’s important. It’s a representation of the world encoded in a human format. We’re basically skipping a step of evolving a way to encode this data.
Did you actually read through the paper?
Unpaywalled direct link to paper [PDF] courtesy of the Unpaywall add-on.