Linux

I don't feel like LLMs are conscious and I act accordingly as though they aren't, but I do wonder about the confidence with which you can totally dismiss the notion. Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don't really know exactly what consciousness is, it seems difficult to rigorously decide upon what does and doesn't get to be in the category. The usual means by which LLMs are explained not to be conscious, and indeed what I usually say myself, is something like your "they just output probability based on current context" or some variation of "they're just guessing the next word", but... is that definitely nothing like what we ourselves do and then call consciousness? Or if indeed that is definitively quite unlike anything we do, does that dissimilarity alone suffice to declare LLMs not conscious? Is ours the only possible example of consciousness, or is the process that drives the behaviour with LLMs possibly just another form or another way of arriving at consciousness? There's evidently something that triggers an instinctual categorising, most wouldn't classify a rock as conscious and would find my suggestion that 'maybe it's just consciousness in another form than ours' a pretty weak way to assert that it is, but then again there's quite a long way between a literal rock and these models running on specific rocks arranged in a particular way and which produce text in a way that's really similar to the human beings that we all collectively tend to agree are conscious. Is being able to summarise the mechanisms that underpin the behaviour who's output or manifestation looks like consciousness, enough on it's own to explain why it definitely isn't consciousness? Because, what if our endeavours to understand consciousness and understand a biological basis for it in ourselves bear fruit and we can explain deterministically how brains and human consciousness work? In that case, we could, if not totally predict human behaviours deterministically, then at least still give a pretty good and similar summarisation of how we produce those behaviours that look like consciousness. Would we at that point declare that human beings are not conscious either, or would we need a new basis upon which to exclude these current machine approximations of it?

I always felt that things such as the Chinese Room thought experiment didn't adequately deal with what I was driving at in the previous paragraph and it seems to me that dismissals of machine consciousness on the grounds that LLMs are just statistical models that don't know what they are doing are missing a similar point. Are we sure that we ourselves are not mechanistically following complicated rules just as neural networks and LLMs are and that's simply what the experience of consciousness actually is - an unconscious execution of rulesets? Before the current crop of technology that has renewed interest in these questions, when it all seemed a lot more theoretical and perennially decades off, I was comfortable with this uncomfortable thought. Now that we actually have these impressive models that have people wondering about the topic, I seem to be skewing more skeptical and less generous about ascribing consciousness. Suddenly now the Chinese Room thought experiment as a counter to whether these conscious-looking LLMs are really conscious looks more convincing, but that's not because of any new or better understanding on my part. I seem to be just goal post shifting when faced with something that does a better job of looking conscious than any technology I'd seen previously.

Hardware arguments are nonsense. We know it can be done at 20W on a 3lb lump of meat, and have no reason to believe that’s the most efficient implementation possible.

Big time, guy very likely has had a god complex his entire life but it's probably also being driven by the LLM echoing back to him that "you made me and im AGI and therefore you are the greatest engineer of all time".

Lol, wasn't that pretty much how it went with that story from a Google employee who claimed their AI was sentient?

At least there's no murders this time around... I'll take it.

You try to develop a Linux filesystem and see what that does to your mental stability. The interactions on the Linux Kernel Mailing List alone are enough to push most people off the deep end.

That guy actually was an insanely talented engineer though just suffered from some serious mental illnesses.

This is actually a big step up from ReiserFS ...

The "best engineer in the world" said that it "is fully conscious according to any test I can think of", which of course means that it is conscious for all possible tests, and so it is unnecessary to look at any particular test or definition of consciousness

No need for intelligence, it just needs to make money ദ്ദി(ᵔᗜᵔ)                   

"OpenAI has introduced a new perspective on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), signaling a significant shift in its strategic priorities. Historically focused on creating AI systems capable of surpassing human performance across diverse tasks, the company now ties AGI to a financial benchmark: achieving at least $100 billion in profits. This redefinition reflects OpenAI’s evolving vision, emphasizing measurable economic impact over purely technical milestones. For you, this marks a pivotal moment in how AI’s success is evaluated and its role in shaping the global economy."             

https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/openai-profit-driven-agi/