> it is equally naive to say with certainty that it has not “awakened” either
Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills, or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it, we would recognize the first as a delusion, and the second as a technical misunderstanding. Even though I don't fully understand what is going on in a dog brain or LLM.
I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness. So instead of seeing the emergence of a remarkably unfamiliar and not-human consciousness, it is falling into familiar sci-fi tropes. The Geoff Lewis posts were pretty directly following the writing style of the "SCP Foundation" collaborative fiction.
>Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills,
The problem here is that this analogy doesn't work. The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened.
>or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it
No this doesn't apply. Because it's a ground truth fact that the LLM is not doing anything when not analyzing a prompt.
> I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness.
Nah most people aren't doing this. It's a small minority that falls for this. But to your other point that it is <NOT> naive to say it is not "awakened"... when all observable evidence points to responses that signify understanding that is extremely identical to human output... then from an observational standpoint saying it is conciouse is a reasonable possibility because it's all we can ascertain from available information.
You can't say absolutely it is conciouse because there's not enough evidence. But this goes both ways. You can't say it isn't either.
What people don't realize is that given observable evidence to say absolutely that the LLM is just a stochastic parrot and is not conciouse is just as stupid and niave to say absolutely an LLM is "alive." Same type of stupidity.
> it is equally naive to say with certainty that it has not “awakened” either
Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills, or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it, we would recognize the first as a delusion, and the second as a technical misunderstanding. Even though I don't fully understand what is going on in a dog brain or LLM.
I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness. So instead of seeing the emergence of a remarkably unfamiliar and not-human consciousness, it is falling into familiar sci-fi tropes. The Geoff Lewis posts were pretty directly following the writing style of the "SCP Foundation" collaborative fiction.
>Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills,
The problem here is that this analogy doesn't work. The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened.
>or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it
No this doesn't apply. Because it's a ground truth fact that the LLM is not doing anything when not analyzing a prompt.
> I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness.
Nah most people aren't doing this. It's a small minority that falls for this. But to your other point that it is <NOT> naive to say it is not "awakened"... when all observable evidence points to responses that signify understanding that is extremely identical to human output... then from an observational standpoint saying it is conciouse is a reasonable possibility because it's all we can ascertain from available information.
You can't say absolutely it is conciouse because there's not enough evidence. But this goes both ways. You can't say it isn't either.
What people don't realize is that given observable evidence to say absolutely that the LLM is just a stochastic parrot and is not conciouse is just as stupid and niave to say absolutely an LLM is "alive." Same type of stupidity.
> The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
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> And the tone, like this site, is just patronizing.
Physician, heal thyself.
nobody understands this response.
It's hardly obscure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physician,_heal_thyself
You're condescending to people all over this thread, calling them things like "arm chair experts".
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> Here’s the ground truth reality of LLMs. LLMs represent an intelligence we don’t understand.
> Hey person who wrote this site… you’re an idiot too. Stop pretending you’re better.
ah.
ah what.