One of the first books I can remember reading was a Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. The concept of tesseracts totally blew my young mind.

It was tulips all along, but stupider.

Your day is coming soon, cryptocurrency.

I love this! I was curious where it was from and I found the original author discussing their post on Reddit:

A vintage poster with a dog and a goat mowing down flags of fascist and extreme right-wing movements from several countries.

For this poster I wanted to make a rather soft visual but with a clear anti-fascist and internationalist theme. That’s why the dog and the goat are destroying flags symbolising the extreme right in several countries, on several continents. The reference to the grass is a small nod to ecology, as in many cases mowing the lawn is absolutely unnecessary and dangerous for nature. Then it was a bit catchy.

[Image description] A landscape format image imitating the rendering of 19th century lithographic prints with lots of grain. The image is as if printed on a paper whose texture and defects can be guessed.

The image represents 1 goat and a dog pushing a manual lawnmower. Both are standing on their hind legs and leaning on the handle of the machine. The goat is grey and brown in colour. It is wearing a kind of red stole around its chest and a belt with pockets. The dog has a thick white coat. It is wearing a red cap and a pair of burgundy boots.

The lawnmower they are pushing is quite elaborate. The whole thing is in silver and burgundy tones. The whole mechanism is visible and you can see the wheels and blades turning.

As it moves forward, the mower catches and destroys small flags planted in the grass. The flags all have a blue pole but are made of different coloured and patterned fabric. Besides symbols linked to the far right in general, several flags remind of hate movements in France, Poland, Greece, Japan, etc. Once under the lawnmower, the flags all come out as confetti of different colours.

Behind the dog and the goat, which are heading towards the left of the picture, we notice that there are small blue poles that have been mowed and that no longer have any flags.

The background of the picture consists of a small path, dunes with tall grass and a blue sky.

In the upper left corner, a text written in a black font and in a vintage, whimsical style and composition reads: Mow Down Fascism, not grass.

The image is completed with a red border and some simple ornaments.

It’s entirely not irrelevant. Even if you create a program to evolve pong, that was also designed by a human. As a computer programmer you should know that no computer program will just become pong, what an idiotic idea.

You just keep pivoting away from how you were using words to them meaning something entirely different; this entire argument is worthless. At least LLMs don’t change the definitions of the words they use as they use them.

I’m giving up here but evolution did not “design” us. LLMs are designs and created with a purpose in mind and they fulfill that purpose. Humans were not designed.

If you truly believe humans are simply autocompletion engines then I just don’t know what to tell you. I think most reasonable people would disagree with you.

Humans have actual thoughts and emotions; LLMs do not. The neural networks that LLMs use, while based conceptually in biological neural networks, are not biological neural networks. It is not a difference of complexity, but of kind.

Additionally, no matter how many statistics, CPU power, or data you give an LLM, it will not develop cognition because it is not designed to mimic cognition. It is designed to link words together. It does that and nothing more.

A dog is more sentient than an LLM in the same way that a human is more sentient than a toaster.

LLMs do not “teach,” and that is why learning from them is dangerous. They synthesize words and return other words, but they do not understand the content presented to them in any sense. Because of this, there is the chance that they are simply spouting bullshit.

Learn from them if you like, but remember they are absolutely no substitute for a human, and basically everything they tell you must be checked for correctness.

Lol… come on. Your second source disagrees with your assertion:

Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

You are wrong and it is quite settled. Read more, including the very sources you’re trying to recommend others read.

The two types of loops you equivocate are totally different; saying that a computer executing a program, and an animal living, are actually the same, is very silly indeed. Like, air currents have a “core loop” of blowing around a lot but no one says that they’re intelligent or that they’re like computer programs or humans.

You’ve ignored my main complaint. I said that you treat LLMs and humans at different levels of abstraction:

No; you are analogizing them but losing sense of their differences in the process. I am not abstracting LLMs. That is all they do. That is what they were designed to do and what they accomplish.

You are drawing a comparison between a process humans have that generates consciousness, and literally the entirety of an LLM’s existence. There is nothing else to an LLM. Whereas if you say “well a human is basically just bouncing electro-chemical signals between neurons and moving muscles” people (like me) would rightly say you were missing the forest for the trees.

The “trees” for an LLM are their neural networks and word vectors. The forest is a word prediction algorithm. There is no higher level to what they do.

That’s a fair assessment but besides the point: A thermostat has an internal state it can affect (the valve), is under its control and not that of silly humans (that is, not directly) aka an internal world.

I apologize if I was unclear when I spoke of an internal world. I meant interior thoughts and feelings. I think most people would agree sentience is predicated on the idea that the sentient object has some combination of its own emotions, motivations, desires, and ability to experience the world.

LLMs have as much of that as a thermostat does; that is, zero. It is a word completion algorithm and nothing more.

Your paper doesn’t bother to define what these T-systems are so I can’t speak to your categorization. But I think rating the mental abilities of thermostats versus computers versus ChatGPT versus human minds totally absurd. They aren’t on the same scale, they’re different kinds of things. Human minds have actual sentience. Everything else in that list is a device, created by humans, to do a specific task and nothing more. None of them are anything more than that.

LLMs already do quite a few things they were not designed to do.

No; they do exactly what they were designed to do, which is convert words to vectors, do math with them, and convert it back again. That we’ve find more utility in this use does not change their design.

What if “the internet” developed some form of self-awareness - would we know?

Uh what? Like how would it? This is just technomystical garbage. Enough data in one place and enough CPU in one place doesn’t magically make that place sentient. I love it as a book idea, but this is real life.

What about feedback and ability to self-modify?

This would be a significant design divergence from what LLMs are, so I’d call those things something different.

But in any event that still would not actually give LLMs anything approaching: thoughts, feelings, or rationality. Or even the capability to understand what they were operating on. Again, they have none of those things and they aren’t close to them. They are word completion algorithms.

Humans are not word completion algorithms. We have an internal existence and thought process that LLMs do not have and will never have.

Perhaps at some point we will have true artificial intelligence. But LLMs are not that, and they are not close.

They have no core loop. You are anthropomorphizing them. They are literally no more self-directed than a calculator, and have no more of a “core loop” than a calculator does.

Do you believe humans are simply very advanced and very complicated calculators? I think most people would say “no.” While humans can do mathematics, we are different entirely to calculators. We experience sentience; thoughts, feelings, emotions, rationality. None of the devices we’ve ever built, no matter how clever, has any of those things: and neither do LLMs.

If you do think humans are as deterministic as a calculator then I guess I don’t know what to tell you other than I disagree. Other people actually exist and have internal realities. LLMs don’t. That’s the difference.

By telling me you are.

If you ask ChatGPT if it is sentient, or has any thoughts, or experiences any feelings, what is its response?

But suppose it’s lying.

We also understand the math underlying it. Humans designed and constructed it; we know exactly what it is capable of and what it does. And there is nothing inside it that is capable of thought or feeling or even rationality.

It is a word generation algorithm. Nothing more.

we can be expressed as algorithms

Wow, do you have any proof of this wild assertion? Has this ever been done before or is this simply conjecture?

a thermostat also has an internal world

No. A thermostat is an unthinking device. It has no thoughts or feelings and no “self.” In this regard it is the same as LLMs, which also have no thoughts, feelings, or “self.”

A thermostat executes actions when a human acts upon it. But it has no agency and does not think in any sense; it does simply what it was designed to do. LLMs are to language as thermostats are to controlling HVAC systems, and nothing more than that.

There is as much chance of your thermostat gaining sentience if we give it more computing power as an LLM.

I think it’s hilarious you aren’t listening to anyone telling you you’re wrong, even the bot itself. Must be nice to be so confident.

I would encourage you to ask ChatGPT itself if it is intelligent or performs reasoning.

I think I write well :) I am not an LLM though.

Even if they are a result of complexity, that still doesn’t change the fact that LLMs will never be complex in that manner.

Again, LLMs have no self-awareness. They are not designed to have self-awareness. They do not have feelings or emotions or thoughts; they cannot have those things because all they do is generate words in response to queries. Unless their design fundamentally changes, they are incompatible with consciousness. They are, as I’ve said before, complicated autosuggestion algorithms.

Suggesting that throwing enough hardware at them will change their design is absurd. It’s like saying if you throw enough hardware at a calculator, it will develop sentience. But a calculator will not do that because all it’s programmed to do is add numbers together. There’s no hidden ability to think or feel lurking in its design. So too LLMs.

Those two things can be true at the same time.

No, they can’t. The question is fundamentally: do humans have any internal thoughts or feelings, or are they algorithms? If you believe other people aren’t literally NPCs, then they are not LLMs.

May as well ask me to prove that we know enough about calculators to say they won’t develop sentience while I’m at it.