When tested with a classic psychological assessment, advanced AI models experienced a total breakdown in focus. A new PNAS Nexus study suggests these systems lack the human-like executive control necessary to override automatic responses and maintain complex goals.
So true, and the things that LLM agents are good at, humans test very poorly by comparison, particularly on speed.
To be fair, run an LLM on a machine with an equivelent power requirement to the human brain and we might se some different results on that one.
While it’s true that a human brain only uses ~20W of power, it’s a really specific kind of organically delivered power with all sorts of environmental requirements that we, being humans, take for granted, but in the bigger picture it’s really a rare location in this universe that doesn’t kill us nearly instantly - much less provide that 20W of power in a form a brain can use.
@CheeseNoodle @MangoCats so like 20 watts of power? Yes that seems fair
So my GPU is about 300 watts and a still blatantly stupid LLM can write a little faster than me. Take off 100w to bring that down to my own writing speed then make it 10x slower to turn that 200 watts into 20 watts. Even with that heavy bias in the LLMs favour (forgiving it the entire power cost of my PCs other components that it partially utilizes) what we get is something slow, dumb, and incapable of learning because any local model is statically weighted.
That’s one way to compare it.
Now, take your privileged writer status human brain and factor in all the other power required to keep it comfy in an air conditioned room, the labor required to put a roof over your head, keep your home plumbing working, make your food, deliver you pen and paper to write with - or are you using an electrically powered appliance to record and later communicate your thoughts? Oh, did you need to go to sleep for a while?
Do I get to include the gargantuan cooling system for the data centre and all the infastructure required to keep that going?
Total impact is the only fair comparison. Pollution from the power plants included, sewage treatment from the houses too.
Humans living is the whole point of civilization, though. We don’t need the LLM to pay for the techbro carbon footprint or olichsrch child abuse, so we should similarly exclude the human’s base sustensnce and survival from their budget.
You can include the human writer’s coffee, music, and writing snacks / cigarettes.