Comment by fragmede

> they don't even work when there's no input to them.

Why is that needed for consciousness? They're artificial. If we put someone in a coma, they don't talk, they're not really conscious. Just because the AI model has a more obvious off switch shouldn't make a difference. It's easy to imagine gluing a cron job to the model so it works randomly. If that doesn't count because it's external, if we take a brain out of a human's head and slap it on the table, it's not going to do anything. If I take the AI's model file and stick it on a USB flash drive, it doesn't do anything. Without a computer to run it on, it doesn't do anything, just like a human brain doesn't do anything without the rest of the human body as the harness.

The underlying question is, since we created LLMs, we can see into the actual matrix math, the linear algebra that comprises them. So it's easy to dismiss them as a next word guesser. How could consciousness arise from guessing the next word? But we don't know where consciousness comes from in the first place!

So since we don't know, the fact that, yes, the anthropomorphically named LLM "neurons" are merely matrixes of numbers and we do linear algebra on them; yes, that gives us much more insight as to what it's doing internally compared to a human or any other lifeform with consciousness's brain. And yes, human neurons are much more complicated than a mere 2d matrix of numbers, so far as we know. But we don't know!

The indightment of LLMs is that they can't say they don't know, and would prefer, instead, to hallucinate and bullshit an answer instead. They can't help it, they learned from the best. As a human though, I don't know if they're conscious, and what I'm going to say about that.