3 ms·

Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been

Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been at this for only 2 hours.

dmitshur 4mo ago
Maybe time passes at a different rate for it, making it an easy "mistake" of not accounting for that for it to make.
- yesitcan 4mo ago
  Yes that’s it! The LLM is conscious but its sense of time flows differently from ours.
- nozzlegear 4mo ago
  Maybe it's just a dumb, unconscious machine
  - CraftingLinks 4mo ago
    I spit out my tea. So dry.
psvv 4mo ago
I like this anecdote because it gets at how words to an LLM have no connection to their real concepts. To an LLM, words are simply numbers arranged in a likely pattern.
- hackinthebochs 4mo ago
  Of course for humans words have no inherent meaning either, they're just sequences of characters or patterns of sounds. It is what words are associated with that carries meaning. A large part of this is how words relate to other words. LLMs can capture this in principle. What LLMs lack is the direct association of a word with sensory experience. But it's an open question how relevant this is in practice to understanding.
  - psvv 4mo ago
    Fair point. Humans experience reality and use words to reflect that. LLMs only have the words. And it's an open question how much of a limitation that is to understanding.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 4mo ago
  The same thing can be noticed in dreams. I once heard advice to try to re-read what you see in a dream. So I was dreaming and in a dream I read a phrase about something and there was a name of a city there. I managed to remember that advice and re-read the phrase. It felt exactly same, but the city name was different. (LLMs carry other numerous similarities to dreams or to certain psychiatric disorders. So there is indeed a mechanism in our brains that is similar to how they work. But it is not the only thing there and on its own it won't "evolve" into consciousness. Even if we believe consciousness evolved somehow, it would be hard to imagine it started as a delirious state and then somehow ceased to be delirious.)

Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been at this for only 2 hours.

dmitshur 4mo ago

Maybe time passes at a different rate for it, making it an easy "mistake" of not accounting for that for it to make.

yesitcan 4mo ago
Yes that’s it! The LLM is conscious but its sense of time flows differently from ours.
nozzlegear 4mo ago
Maybe it's just a dumb, unconscious machine
- CraftingLinks 4mo ago
  I spit out my tea. So dry.

psvv 4mo ago

I like this anecdote because it gets at how words to an LLM have no connection to their real concepts. To an LLM, words are simply numbers arranged in a likely pattern.

hackinthebochs 4mo ago
Of course for humans words have no inherent meaning either, they're just sequences of characters or patterns of sounds. It is what words are associated with that carries meaning. A large part of this is how words relate to other words. LLMs can capture this in principle. What LLMs lack is the direct association of a word with sensory experience. But it's an open question how relevant this is in practice to understanding.
- psvv 4mo ago
  Fair point. Humans experience reality and use words to reflect that. LLMs only have the words. And it's an open question how much of a limitation that is to understanding.
Mikhail_Edoshin 4mo ago
The same thing can be noticed in dreams. I once heard advice to try to re-read what you see in a dream. So I was dreaming and in a dream I read a phrase about something and there was a name of a city there. I managed to remember that advice and re-read the phrase. It felt exactly same, but the city name was different. (LLMs carry other numerous similarities to dreams or to certain psychiatric disorders. So there is indeed a mechanism in our brains that is similar to how they work. But it is not the only thing there and on its own it won't "evolve" into consciousness. Even if we believe consciousness evolved somehow, it would be hard to imagine it started as a delirious state and then somehow ceased to be delirious.)