I don’t think that’s really a fair comparison, babies exist with images and sounds for over a year before they begin to learn language, so it would make sense that they begin to understand the world in non-linguistic terms and then apply language to that. LLMs only exist in relation to language so couldnt understand a concept separately to language, it would be like asking a person to conceptualise radio waves prior to having heard about them.

Probably, given that LLMs only exist in the domain of language, still interesting that they seem to have a “conceptual” systems that is commonly shared between languages.

Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

Interesting that…

Anthropic also found, among other things, that Claude “sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal ‘language of thought’.”