Comment by unrented7977
4 days ago
Yes, they are. An AI is several hundred trillion ones and zeroes on a disk. It's incapable of doing anything until you intentionally and explicitly start it up and give it a prompt.
A dog is an independent, conscious, living being with free will. A dog will do what it wants whenever it wants because it has the agency and ability to do so. A pile of weights on disk does not.
> It's incapable of doing anything until you intentionally and explicitly start it up and give it a prompt.
Sure, but since January people have gone and made systems where they started 'em up and left 'em running in a loop. Still not a dog, but the behavior gets a wee bit more interesting. Especially since we're looking at what's basically a recursive process. Even really simple recursive processes tend to have interesting dynamics in the chaotic domain. [1] And here -as you point out- we're talking billions of weights.
[1] As an intuition take for example x_next = r * x * (1-x) ; which gives this plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map#/media/File:Logis... ... Further discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map
Why are you reducing the AI to ones and zeros and not reducing the dog to cells, water, proteins etc.?
Sure. A dog is a collection of cells and goo. Cells are self-propelling clockwork built from proteins and molecular machinery.
A cell by itself has agency and motivation, is capable of autonomous response to stimuli. It's alive and squirms when you poke it. A cell is capable of truly independent action. It can even feed itself and make its own energy to power the clockwork.
An LLM still is inert silicon until a human intentionally starts it and gives it a prompt. It's fundamentally incapable of action without instruction and incapable of existing without the entirety of the modern internet and electrical infrastructure, and the thousands of unseen human hands keeping the wheels spinning.
If you want to go deeper, you can make the same arguments about the proteins and molecular machines. Self-replicating molecules in an unbroken chain since the dawn of time. A protein at the base level is a machine capable of independent action. If it bumps into the right molecule, pure mechanics cause it to do something, change shape.
Ones and zeroes on a hard drive can't do any of that without human intent applied.
Oh sure, but you're comparing the wrong states.
If you rip the DNA out of a cell it isn't going to do much either; if only because most of the real mechanisms are RNA (and proteins), while DNA is 'just' the storage. Encapsulate the DNA back into a cell nucleus with the attendant mechanisms, and suddenly you've got something that runs again.
Meanwhile, if you encapsulate an LLM into what's called an 'agentic harness', it's also going to be running much more of the time (depending), specially if it has a what's called a heartbeat or goal loop driving it.
Still not a cell; most definitely not. But the behavior is a wee bit more interesting than some bits on an ssd.
Actually you probably already know this one: Regular daemons are also just bits on your drive, until they get ```systemctl start``` ed
(edit: I literally have a llama.cpp systemd unit running right now)
Because the AI is a cyclical prediction machine that is more akin to a simple mechanism in nature like cell reproduction than a conscious dog. What has happened here is more like the AI company put bacteria in a petri dish and only put the lid on without pushing it down and is reporting the bacteria as a super bacteria because it contaminated all the samples in the fridge.
An interesting observation I've seen is that the AI companies reporting these incidents have largely been backed by venture capital where the self funded companies developing models have largely not had these "problems".
Reduce it to cells, water, proteins, etc. The point still stands.
There is a dog in front of you. What is it doing? Dog stuff.
There is a laptop with chatgpt open in front of you. What is it doing? Waiting for your prompt, doing nothing.
Suppose I find a means to freeze your entire body for arbitrary periods at the state it was in, then unfreeze you anytime I want. Do you have consciousness?
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He will have no answer. His answer is "souls".