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No. You’re the one who is ignorant. The LLM is a black box. We do not, in fact know how it works. We know the learning algorithm and we know the scaffold of th
by threethirtytwo 2mo ago
No. You’re the one who is ignorant.
The LLM is a black box. We do not, in fact know how it works. We know the learning algorithm and we know the scaffold of the transformer network, but the end result of all the weights interacting with each other is something we do not understand. We do not understand this anymore than we understand the human brain.
Now from this the best technical answer we can give is that we don’t know whether the LLM understands or is conscious. But you have to realize that same lack of understanding applies to humans. From a technical standpoint, You cannot say whether your best friend is conscious or not for the same technical reasons as to why you cannot say the same for the LLM. You don’t in actuality know anything.
So, when we have a machine that produces output identical and indistinguishable from an intelligent entity it is actually reasonable to call it conscious, because we already do this for humans. There is no other factor involved. What is clear is that the LLM isn’t human… there is enough evidence to show that its nature is extremely alien. But to say it doesn’t understand or it isn’t self aware is not something anyone can definitively make a statement about other then the fact that it BEHAVES and communicates in a virtually indistinguishable way from something that is self aware.
HN is full of arm chair experts who think they know what they are talking about. But you guys actually don’t. HN was wrong about AI and self driving cars, now we have Waymo. 10 years of research produced self driving cars that are 10x safer than humans. HN was wrong about LLMs. In the beginning HN was sure all it could do was write slop bootstrapped code… now it writes code for all of us. More than the general public HN has been making wrong predictions and wrong statements about AI with an authority that is outright ludicrous. We need to stop. It’s embarrassing how wrong we’ve been.