By training a large language model (LLM) on a vast data set of human behavior, researchers say they have built an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can mimic a human mind. In a paper published today in Nature, they report that their model, Centaur, can “predict and simulate” human behavior in any experiment that can be written out in natural language.
But other scientists raise their eyebrows at the claim. “I think there’s going to be a big portion of the scientific community that will view this paper very skeptically and be very harsh on it,” says Blake Richards, a computational neuroscientist at McGill University and Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. He and others say the model doesn’t meaningfully mimic human cognitive processes, and that it can’t be trusted to produce results that would match human behavior.
Cognitive scientists often build models to help them understand the systems underlying abilities such as vision and memory. Each of these models captures only a very small, isolated part of human cognition, says Marcel Binz, a cognitive scientist at the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Helmholtz Munich. But with recent advances in LLMs, “we suddenly got this new exciting set of tools,” that might be used to understand the mind as a whole, he says.
