You Are Not a Parrot - And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this

My understanding is that we still do not have a great consensus on how our own brains operate - how we actually think.

How our brains operate and how we think are in ways two different things, but my understanding is that you're correct to a large extent. Then there's the whole question of what consciousness even is.

I was actually just reminded of a good article on consciousness, I'll post it in !science@beehaw.org in just a mo

edit: https://beehaw.org/post/448653

My understanding is that we still do not have a great consensus on how our own brains operate - how we actually think. Is that out of date?

This is an incredibly complicated question. On a very basic level, the very physics of how decisions are made differ from a binary/coded system than how brains work (you don't have 0/1 gates, you can have things encoded inbetween 0 and 1). On a slightly higher level, concepts like working memory don't exist in LLMs (although they've started to include something akin to memory), LLMs hallucinate things because they don't have a method to fact-check, so to speak, and there's a variety of other mental concepts that aren't employed by LLMs. On a much higher level there's questions of what cognition is, and again many of these concepts just cannot be applied to LLMs in their current state.

Ultimately the question of "how our brains work" can be separated into many, many different areas. A good example of this is how two people can reach different conclusions given the same pieces of information based on their background, experiences, genetics, and so forth, and this is a reflection of diversity that affects everything from the architectural (what the physical structure of the brain looks like) to conceptual (how those might interact or what knowledge might inform differing outcomes).