4 ms·
But do you know what it means to know? I'm only being slightly sarcastic. Sentience is a scale. A worm has less than a mouse, a mouse has less than a dog, and
by bradley13 1y ago
But do you know what it means to know?
I'm only being slightly sarcastic. Sentience is a scale. A worm has less than a mouse, a mouse has less than a dog, and a dog less than a human.
Sure, we can reset LLMs at will, but give them memory and continuity, and they definitely do not score zero on the sentience scale.
- DougN7 1y agoIt probably scores about the same as a calculator, which I’d say is zero.
- ofjcihen 1y agoIf I set an LLM in a room by itself what does it do?
- abrookewood 1y agoYes, that's my fall back as well. If it receives zero instructions, will it take any action?
- nhod 1y agoHelen Keller famously said that before she had language (the first word of which was “water”) she had nothing, a void, and the minute she had language, “the whole world came rushing in.” Perhaps we are not so very different?
- fmbb 1y agoAll LLMs have seen more words than any human will ever experience. Yet they cannot take action themselves.
- nhod 1y agoThat’s a safety thing that we have placed upon some LLM’s. If we designed them to have an infinite for loop, the ability to learn and improve, access to mobility and a bunch of sensors, and crypto, what do you think would happen?
- mewpmewp2 1y agoYes, anyone can do it already. E.g. I am sure people have built simple robots with wheels in their home that LLM is controlling by reciving camera, microphone, lidar etc input and then putting output like commands where to turn, what to put in the speakers etc next and could theoretically go indefinitely if there is electricity.
- ben_w 1y ago> Yet they cannot take action themselves. Neither could Hawking, once the motor neurone disease got far enough.
- abrookewood 1y agoI like the sentiment, but reality says otherwise - just watch a newborn baby make it's demands widely known, well before language is a factor.
- withinboredom 1y agoUmmm. Maybe you should look up Helen Keller.
- ofjcihen 1y agoHelen Keller did in fact make her demands they just couldn’t be known. In contrast the LLM does nothing of its own volition.
- mewpmewp2 1y agoIf you put the LLM in a never ending loop, it would definitely be doing something.
- ofjcihen 1y agoA something defined by someone else, yes. Additionally, thinking organisms don’t get stuck in never ending loops because they can CHOOSE to exit the loop. LLMs don’t have that ability
- mewpmewp2 1y agoMy analogy of being in loop means being in a live state. So we as humans are in the loop continuously, we do have a way to exit the loop, but in that comparison it means taking our own life. We are in loops of getting input and producing output. You can also give LLM a tool to shut itself down, or you can give it tools to build on its knowledge base, so it would always be outputting new tokens that are based on new input and are producing different output. E.g. it could have access to camera and microphone feed, which is automatically given to it in interval as part of the loop, it could call tools or functions to store specific bits and pieces of information, to store in its RAG or whatever based knowledge base. It is not going to be in the loop of producing the same token over and over, it would be new tokens because the context and environment is constantly evolving.
- ben_w 1y ago> Yes, that's my fall back as well. If it receives zero instructions, will it take any action? By design, no. But, importantly, that's because the closest it has to an experience of time is an ongoing input of tokens. Humans constantly get new input, so for this to be a fair comparison, the LLM would also have to get constant new input. Humans in solitary confinement become mentally ill (both immediately and long-term), and hallucinate stuff (at least short term, I don't know about long term).
- bradley13 1y agoIs the LLM allowed to do anything without prompting? Or is it effectively disabled? This is more a question of the setup than of sentience.
- rcxdude 1y agoDoes this have anything to do with intelligence or awareness?
- ofjcihen 1y agoAbsolutely.
- mewpmewp2 1y agoWhat tools do you give it? E.g. would you put a GPU there that has LLM loaded into it and it is triggering itself in a loop?
- staticman2 1y ago>Sure, we can reset LLMs at will, but give them memory and continuity, and they definitely do not score zero on the sentience scale. You've recreated a religious belief known as Animism and phrased it in a faux objective way. ("not score zero on the sentience scale.")