Quick Introduction We have all been on forums, chats, reddit, discord, youtube, or somewhere and heard “Oh! Model XYZ is AMAZEBALLZ!zomgwtfbbq” then downloaded it (or more likely, some quantized form of it) and said “eww… This sucks!” This post is going to be a rather technical series of experiments to demonstrate the impact of implementation-specific hazards with inference. I will be using the term “reference implementation” to describe the lab that published and offers first-party hosting of ...
They might operate differently but they still appear the same as us, 99.9% of the time. Imo if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck…
I mean… No? Absolutely not.
I dont even know where to begin. Maybe with their state being fixed in time; LLMs do not change. An sci fi analogy might be the “no timers” in orion’s arm, who are but a single thought frozen in an infinite loop in time:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47f4311eaef31
Except they arent even that, because its just a next word completion model, not something that thinks. It is not self aware.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09211
https://openreview.net/forum?id=klU4737opt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762
This becomes (to me) very obvious if you ever use an LLM in raw completion mode. It very smart, but at the end of the day its no different than a weather prediction model spitting out probabilities for a storm system.
Chat finetuning is meant to get humans to anthropomorphize them by training on human preferences, and the interface further reinforces this. Its all a trick, albeit a very elaborote one.
Will future architectures be closer to “thinking?”
Maybe.
But we are a long way away.
Are we not just prediction systems with more neurons?
Now im not saying LLMs are human at all because to be human is to have gone through our exact evolutionary path, but we really are in a lot of ways much more similar than you think. At least the speaking part of our brain is.
The argument that LLMs are fixed in time does not contradict consciousness. Say a human was stuck in a time loop and the human is asked the same question every single loop, at the exact same time, in the exact same way, with every single atom being in the exact place. Would their answer change? I would argue no, the same exact neurons would be stimulated every time that would cause the same exact answer every time.
We don’t even have a solid definition of what is concious. Are insects conscious? Like the fruit fly, we have modeled all of its neural paths and it simplifies down to essentially being a robot that responds to stimuli.
What does make humans special is our ability to learn. But what when an LLM trains its self? Is that not learning? I think the question of consciousness is too complex to simply say one way or the other and it is foolish to simply it this way.
I can’t believe how many pro-AI arguments essentially boil down to “I do not understand words”.
We have a very solid and explicit definition of what conscious means:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conscious#medicalDictionary
The best neuroscientists in the world do not even fully understand the complicated intricacies of the workings of the human mind. We do understand 100% exactly how computers work. There is no comparison.
I haven’t even argued that AI is concious, I have said that we do not understand consciousness enough to define it. You have completely missed the point. This is Dunning-Kruger at its peak. You are vastly oversimplifying things, at what size of brain is an animal considered conscious or capable of thought? Define thought. We don’t even have a solid understanding of life, much less thoughts. Yes we have a word definition, no we do not know where the line begins and ends. It is a philosophical question that remains unanswered.
This definition is already making so many assumptions and over simplifications. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thought
We understand that the brain is what gives us our cognition, we understand that the brain is made up of chemical and electrical signals. We are not special.
I’m sorry that you have trouble grasping so many basic concepts.
Ironic of you to reference Dunning-Kruger.
All animals are conscious as far as I’m aware, though the complexity of their thoughts may vary. They all act of their own volition, computers do not and cannot act of their own volition.
You do not have to fully understand every aspect of consciousness in order to recognize that inanimate objects do not have it. “Will” is a component of consciousness, this is commonly understood. Computers are tools, they have no will. Computers calculate, they do not think, these are different operations.
I am not oversimplifying things, you are under-thinking things that are already simple (likely due to cognitive offloading).
So your response boils down to “no u,” and insulting. I believe we are done here.
If all you got from that explanation was “no u” then you need to work on your reading comprehension.
I agree that this conversation doesn’t seem to be bearing any fruit tho
For what it’s worth, I thought it was an interesting read until the other person went full ad hominem.
The argument basically: “'computers are not sentient, because I say that they are not sentient”
No, my argument is that your conceptualization of sentience is incomplete.
As if your comprehension, yet your arrogance is stunning because it is massive and is only dwarfed by your propensity for being wrong.
Don’t forget the dictionary quotes and the personal attacks.