Comment by sunjain
5 hours ago
What is happening here is a mechanical thing like in a computer. It is mechanically operating, trying to find out if there is any information stored in the computer [pointing to his head] related to what we are talking about. “Let me see”, “Let me think”; these are statements you are just making, but there is no further activity and no thinking taking place there. You have an illusion that there is somebody who is thinking and bringing out the information. Look, this is no different from the extraordinary instrument we have, the word-finder. You press a button and “Ready”, it says. Then you ask for a word; “Searching”, it says. That searching is thinking. But it is a mechanical process. In the word-finder or computer there is no thinker. There is no thinker thinking at all. If there is any information or anything that is referred to, the computer puts it together and throws it out. That is all that is happening. It is a very mechanical thing that is happening. We are not ready to accept that thought is mechanical because that knocks off the whole image that we are not just machines. It is an extraordinary machine. It is not different from the computers that we use. But this [pointing to his body] is something living; it has got a living quality to it. It has vitality. It is not just mechanically repeating; it carries with it the life energy like that current energy -- UG 40+ years ago
I tend to think this way as well, though I find team stochastic parrot is shrinking by the day. It is very difficult to explain it to people who don’t have at least some grasp of what’s going on inside an LLM, and how they’re trained. We have no psychological “immune system” for something that mirrors our ability to deliver an apparently well-reasoned response to a question in our own language. All our instincts tell us to assign it sentience and treat it as an independent actor with it’s own internal motivations and personality. Even I catch myself doubting that a pile of matrix multiplication isn’t “alive” in some way after using it for a while.