"LLMs are incredibly complex systems with emergent properties we do not fully understand, and it seems possible that because they run on top of a hugely complex model of one our most important cognitive tools (written language), they are capable of exploring the things we do with our cognitive skills in ways we would not imagine when considering their purely mechanistic or operational behavior. Or they may not."
Sure. There are several papers (all the ones I've seen come from the companies themselves, which is unfortunate) which treat the LLMs as semi-biological systems and attempt to understand their behavior at a higher level, which suggests higher order behavior that isn't well predicted by the "probabilistic database" angle.
"LLMs are incredibly complex systems with emergent properties we do not fully understand, and it seems possible that because they run on top of a hugely complex model of one our most important cognitive tools (written language), they are capable of exploring the things we do with our cognitive skills in ways we would not imagine when considering their purely mechanistic or operational behavior. Or they may not."
Something like that.
Sure, if we're going based on feelings, that'd be an interesting take. Anything grounded in any research or actual science though?
Sure. There are several papers (all the ones I've seen come from the companies themselves, which is unfortunate) which treat the LLMs as semi-biological systems and attempt to understand their behavior at a higher level, which suggests higher order behavior that isn't well predicted by the "probabilistic database" angle.
Here's one that I happen to have the URL handy for: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...
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