Comment by human_874539160
4 hours ago
> Another way one could look at it is to consider what it would mean to have achieved programming consciousness. It would mean that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge. That we have become God.
This is such a basic misunderstanding of how LLMs are "made" that I am debating if it is even worth writing this answer. However, I feel it is important to say that, NO, we did absolutely not "program consciousness". We made a framework from which it can semi-organically emerge. Accidentally, this and your other fallacies entirely diminish your arguments.
I'll say this: deeply serious and knowledgeable people work at Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other frontier labs. Much more knowledgeable than you or I are, and they have a lot more information to infer up-to-date knowledge from than you or I do. Trying to engage expert opinion with half-baked amateur philosophy founded in false assumptions is a fool's errand. Skepticism is listening to expert opinion and updating your own assumptions when presented with strong enough evidence. Everything else is baseless, and often harmful, cynicism.
History shows that deeply serious and knowledgeable people are just as susceptible to drinking the koolaid as anyone else, if not more susceptible.
Not GP, but I appreciate the discussion.
Don’t you find it odd that the thing that consciousness emerges from just so happens to be a text prediction algorithm trained on all of human output? Which is also the thing in all the world that would be most likely to be a stochastic parrot?
As for your appeal to expertise, I don’t think it really applies when all of the experts refuse to share their data.
> Don’t you find it odd that the thing that consciousness emerges from just so happens to be a text prediction algorithm trained on all of human output? Which is also the thing in all the world that would be most likely to be a stochastic parrot?
Not particularly. Artificial Intelligence by definition cannot emerge without an originating intelligence – that it needs to learn from it seems only natural. Also, this is only the first example we see of artificial consciousness emerging. We could have probably come up with other methods over time, and AI will probably come up with other, perhaps better foundations later on – it seems likely that we have simply stumbled upon the easiest/crudest route.
> As for your appeal to expertise, I don’t think it really applies when all of the experts refuse to share their data.
If you think about it, they are sharing a remarkable amount of ground breaking "data" for private corporations, not to mention how loud the individual researchers are about their opinions etc. on twixter and other places.
> Much more knowledgeable than you or I are
Speak for yourself. I work for an LLM startup that was successfully bootstrapped and is now highly profitable with 8-digit revenue and zero outside investment. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, we do not rely on deceiving investors to dump a trillion dollars into a tar fire with the false promise of delivering the machine god that will unemploy all of humanity (at best). Taking people who have an unbelievably large financial stake in lying at face value, and moreover, stating that those are the only people who can be trusted, is so unbelievably naive it's almost cute. Almost.
> We made a framework from which it can semi-organically emerge.
...by programming. Again, this is an appeal to emergent behaviour, which, repeating myself, was already well-demonstrated by Conway's Game of Life in 1970, and yet nobody lost their minds because the emergent behaviour didn't happen to refer to itself as "I" when trained to.
> Speak for yourself. I work for an LLM startup
And yet you still fail to demonstrate good understanding of the topic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> stating that those are the only people who can be trusted
You are right, they are most definitely not the only people who can be trusted to have current and accurate information. But due to the unique constraints of these fast-moving events, they are certainly among those whose opinions need to be considered carefully. You would have been be a fool to not take into account the opinions of the physicists working on the Manhattan Project, for example.
> ...by programming. Again, this is an appeal to emergent behaviour
Saying (derisively) that it is an "appeal to emergent behaviour", when the ENTIRE POINT OF CONTENTION is said emergent behaviour is like saying that you should not discuss God at a theological forum or that you should ignore the theory of relativity when discussing gravity.
> And yet you still fail to demonstrate good understanding of the topic
Or you simply misinterpreted my words, seemingly intentionally so because pedantry is a comfortable fall-back for not having a logical argument.
> Saying (derisively) that it is an "appeal to emergent behaviour", when the ENTIRE POINT OF CONTENTION is said emergent behaviour is like saying that you should not discuss God at a theological forum or that you should ignore the theory of relativity when discussing gravity.
The derisiveness comes from the fact that you appear to believe merely demonstrating emergent behaviour is enough, despite the fact that emergent behaviour is common and has been common in programs for half a century without anybody considering them conscious. Life itself is emergent behaviour, but that does not mean all emergent behaviour is life. Life emerged from incredibly complex physical and material interactions over billions of years of incremental self-programming. The idea that we have found some magic ingredient to shortcut the process, that we can recreate that with some very simple statistical model that is not capable of self-programming, is so absurd it becomes about as difficult to argue against as Russell's Teapot. We developed a model for predicting words and it does. Although it does quite an impressive job of that, it has demonstrated zero capability to do anything beyond what you would reasonably expect it to, same as all other software with emergent capabilities and rather unlike life which developed truly novel emergent behaviour relative to its base ingredients.