Right now we don’t have any system that has the correct sort of “information dynamics.” There is no specification available for sentience/intelligence. So peop

Right now we don’t have any system that has the correct sort of “information dynamics.” There is no specification available for sentience/intelligence. So people who want to believe an LLM is sentient can jump to any conclusion they want and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But they’re not right either. I think it’s highly reductionist to compare an LLM to an intelligent, sentient being and claim it’s basically the same thing. We know how model training works, how transformers work, and we know what the expected results are. Not so for consciousness, sentience, or intelligence. Scientists have been making breakthroughs in our understanding of these phenomena but it’s still incomplete. LLM’s are useful for one thing. They’re algorithms that run on a machine to perform work for us.