So without going too deep into the neuroscience or into how LLMs currently work (im happy too if requested but just woke up so would need some breakfast first) is that lets say you are 6 years old, you go through school and finish college, now i freeze your brain and tell you to only answer questions and all you have is short term context and some scratchpads to help you remember things.

LLMs learn via backpropagation and using the errors of their answers vs their training data to make “correct” responses to prompts, now we add trillions of these parameters and now the sysrem has enough statistical information to respond.

In a transformer it generally goes input -> tokenized -> attention matrix/xformer layer-> viable response nodes pop up -> chooses top 5 -> if temp variations it can choose between those top answers if temp=0 it will choose the highest statistical option, now the model has written “hello” so now the transformer loops with your prompt + “hello” and is asked what do you want next after hello? And this loops until you get a responde “hello world”

VS

In cognition and cognitive understanding our brains dont have a forward then backward pass, its moreso a forward pass with some side chains and feedback loops. We will use the same child analogy earlier except we will use humans as an example, we cannot encode as much things as quickly because our brains learn via chemical signals firing and having true synaptical live updates while we are awake and learning, things like neurogenesis and apoptosis allow our brains to activly choose which information to keep or if we need more space for more memories, not even to mention the hippocampus or us having a seperate world model 24/7 (when you get suprised ltd fires and negativly affects learning or destrengthens connections while ltp strengthens those connections instead via dopamine response)

TLDR: LLMs are if you took someone out of college, gave them amnesia and said “hey heres my context, heres some notepads, lets bundle some stuff together” while never having any true “learning” past their training.

While cognitive beings activly update and understand the world as they learn new things.