Comment by jjcm
1 day ago
I think we might be looking at it the wrong way. An individual chat with an LLM is not consciousness, but the entire model itself, over time, might be.
Everyone has a different definition of consciousness, but in my mind memory and the ability to change over time is an inherent aspect of this. The underlying weights don't change when you chat with an LLM... but they do with further RL.
Overtime that reinforcement will change and adapt the model... and because we're feeding its existing chats back into it along with the news and everything else, it will create memories. I do wonder if an architecture itself is a type of consciousness, that experiences life in snippets of 4.6, 4.7, 4.8... etc.
It'd be interesting to see continous daily releases of a trained checkpoint, and see if more of this starts to emerge.
But doesn't the fact that WE have to feed the existing chats back into it and WE have to do further RL prove that your point is moot? Consciousness does not wait to be prompted. Consciousness does not need anything fed back into it because it is already there because they experienced the actual interaction. A conscious mind does not have an on/off switch where it waits for another being to flip the switch in order for it to learn or experience. These systems are static without human intervention. They are in that sense still a lot more like a computer and a lot less like a living organism that exists.