I’ve often wondered about the nature of dreams and why we experience them. As I work and think about how LLMs process information through its neural net, I think about some intriguing parallels between the way our brains function during sleep and the way LLMs process information.
Research suggests that dreaming is a way for our brains to consolidate memories, process emotions, and make sense of the world around us. During the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of sleep, our brains are highly active, firing off neurons in a manner that resembles waking consciousness. This activity allows our brains to strengthen important neural connections while pruning away less essential ones.
Interestingly, LLMs seem to go through a similar process when they “hallucinate” information, and firing off neurons too. In a way, just as our brains create vivid, sometimes nonsensical dreams by combining and reconfiguring stored memories, LLMs can generate novel content by drawing upon the vast amounts of data they’ve been trained on. This process of generating new information based on existing knowledge is not unlike the way our brains create dreams.
Moreover, the process of fine-tuning an LLM can lead to a phenomenon akin to memory loss in humans. When an LLM is fine-tuned on a specific dataset, it may “forget” some of the information it had previously learned, just as humans can forget old memories as they acquire new ones. From a physics perspective, this makes sense because there is finite amount of memory in an LLM, just as the human brain has finite capacity too.
These similarities between human dreaming and LLM hallucinations raise a fascinating question: is intelligence truly unique to humans? While the physical structures of our brains and the architecture of LLMs are vastly different, the underlying principles of information processing and storage seem to share some common ground.
As we continue to explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the line between human and machine cognition is blurring. While I don’t believe that LLMs are conscious in the same way humans are, I do think that the parallels between dreaming and LLM hallucinations offer a tantalizing glimpse into the fundamental nature of intelligence.