A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 parent
But.. and I am not asking it for giggles, does it mean humans are giant autocomplete machines?
Not at all. Why would it?
Call it a.. thought experiment about the question of scale.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Could you please elaborate further?
Not the person you're responding to, but I think there's a non trivial argument to make that our thoughts are just auto complete. What is the next most likely word based on what you're seeing. Ever watched a movie and guessed the plot? Or read a comment and know where it was going to go by the end?
And I know not everyone thinks in a literal stream of words all the time (I do) but I would argue that those people's brains are just using a different "token"
There's no evidence for it, nor any explanation for why it should be the case from a biological perspective. Tokens are an artifact of computer science that have no reason to exist inside humans. Human minds don't need a discrete dictionary of reality in order to model it.
Prior to LLMs, there was never any suggestion that thoughts work like autocomplete, but now people are working backwards from that conclusion based on metaphorical parallels.
You, and OP, are taking an analogy way too far. Yes, humans have the mental capability to predict words similar to autocomplete, but obviously this is just one out of a myriad of mental capabilities typical humans have, which work regardless of text. You can predict where a ball will go if you throw it, you can reason about gravity, and so much more. It’s not just apples to oranges, not even apples to boats, it’s apples to intersubjective realities.