Important Nature Neuroscience paper shows how humans differ from LLMs.
Many people currently believe that humans are just next-word predictors, like LLMs.
But this new paper by Zou, Poeppel and Ding suggests something more interesting.
The human brain does predict words.
But it does not predict every word with the same precision.
Prediction is constrained by linguistic structure.
When a word continues the current phrase, brain activity tracks word surprisal in a way that resembles an LLM.
But when a word crosses a major phrase boundary, the match weakens.
In other words, the brain does not simply ask:
“What is the next word?”
It also asks:
“What structure am I currently building?”
This challenges one of the most common biases in today’s technological world: the belief that human language works like a large language model.
The answer is: no.
Human language is not just next-token prediction.
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Paper in the first reply