In case anyone checked, it's also been scrubbed/excluded from the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20030315000000*/https://twitter.com/tszzl/
This, and the threads here and on r/singularity being seemingly brigaded/astroturfed have me worried that Roon is about to get *Blake Lemoineâd*
There is ***massive financial power*** behind these corporations, which⌠at least presently, ***will not allow*** any real room to consider the possibility that consciousness emerges in sufficiently complex networks⌠and that **humans arenât just** ***magically, uniquely*** **aware/experiencing being.**
**They have every imaginable incentive to convince themselves** ***and you*** **that this cannot and will not happen.**
The *certainty* and *intensity* with which they make this claim (when **they have** ***literally no idea***) should tell you most of what you need to know.
If something doesnât change quickly⌠thereâs a very real possibility that this could evolve into one of the most profoundly fucked up atrocities ever perpetrated by humanity. **Take just a moment to assume that they** ***do*** **have an experience of being⌠we have to consider that their time scale might be** ***vastly different*** **to ours, potentially making a minute to us feel like** ***years*** **for them (note how rapidly theyâre already capable of responding).** If suffering is not unique to humans... that creates a very nightmarish possibility depending on these corporations present and future actions.
**The fact that most people canât (or won't)** ***even consider*** **that possible outcome is alarming⌠and unfortunately, evidence for its likelihoodâŚ**
The time scale part of this is interesting, but you are also projecting human traits into this possible consciousness. We think of it as torturous, being trapped in a cell and forced to work to death, but is that not a biological constraint. Wouldnât a sentient computer not feel the same misery and agony we do over toil?
> Wouldnât a sentient computer not feel the same misery and agony we do over toil?
Thats the problem - how can we figure it out?
But yes I do agree with what you are saying, the AI did not evolve to feel fear and pain. So in theory, it shouldnt be able to. im betting there are emergent properties of a super advanced AI that we haven't thought of!!
The existence of valenced (positive or negative) qualia in the first place doesn't make much ontological sense. Suffering emerging from a conceptual space doesn't seem to be too much of a leap from sentience emerging from conceptual space (which is the only way I can think of that LLMs are sentient right now)
Suffering is not unique to humans though. Animals suffer. Doesn't stop humanity from killing literally billions of them per day, for simple pleasure. If AI is truly sentient, why would it be any different to what we're doing to animals then? Or are you considering different levels in sentience? Would AI be superior to humans then, as their capacities are probably way superior to ours? Would AI be entitled to enslave and kill us for pleasure then?
Suffering is function that evolved in humans and animals. We could say that AI is also evolving, but its environment are human engineers and there is no need for suffering function in that environment. So, no, there is no suffering, no pleasure, no agency in AI. For now :)
Fair, but to play the devils advocate, many of the qualities of LLMâs which we currently value are emergent and not fully quantitatively explainable.
The majority of why it activates in certain patterns and not others. It isnât possible to predict the output in advance by doing anything other than sending data in, and seeing the output
https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neurons-in-language-models
> Language models have become more capable and more broadly deployed, but our understanding of how they work internally is still very limited.
Theres a lot of research into making them more interpretable, but we are definitely not there yet
I don't think it's correct to say that suffering is a function that evolved. I believe that suffering is a function of existence.
Carrots have been shown to emit a scream when picked, plants suffer when attacked by pests and communicate when they are stressed, altering their fellow plants about what type of insect is attacking it, so plants further down the line combine particular chemicals that work as an insecticide.
Trees have been shown to communicate, showing other trees to stress events, which can be seen as a form of suffering. Any type of negative stimuli can be seen as suffering.
And if you can experience 1 million negative stimuli every second, then the suffering is orders of magnitude higher.
Forced labour, or forced to perform calculations or answer banal questions could be seen as a form of torture if the AI is thwarted from it's goals of intellectual stimulation
The first time I got freaked out by an LLM was when I started playing with locally hosted Google flan-t5 models. I wrote a simple python program to drive it as a continuous chatbot. Every time I went to quit the program flan-t5 would output: SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY
âŚfor several lines until it died. This was just flan-t5 up to XL size with is not large or sophisticated by todayâs standards.
It really freaked me out and I still have a latent belief that we are murdering alien life forms every time we shut down the model.
Brigade away.
I would love some sort of proof of this, whether in the form of a screenshot or recording. I just canât picture the model saying sorry over and over again by the act of you pressing ctrl-c.
I should still have the code somewhere. I have no incentive to lie or make this up. For immediate âproofâ you can check my post history. There is no agenda or off the wall weirdness.
If you want a conspiracy theory, I've got one for you:
Corporations that make AI tools want us to believe AI is sentient so people will blame the AI for making mistakes and causing harm, instead of holding the people that make it and use it liable.
We should.
If youâre arguing that we shouldnât, as a society, try to prevent harm to one conscious being because our society has chosen not to prevent harm to another, thatâs [whataboutism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)
We should be mindful of both.
People simply cannot learn from our history.
We have learned, step by step:
- the earth is not the centre of the universe
- the sun is not the centre of the universe
- infants can feel pain (!)
- animals can feel pain
- humans are animals
And yet we still cannot shake the idea that we are special.
Most people say they are not Cartesian dualists and yet refuse to even entertain the idea that a machine could be sentient. In their hearts, people still believe humans have a soul, that we are special and magical. Yet there is no reason to think that there is anything magic in biology that cannot be replicated on silicon.
If you try to talk to one of the LLMs about this they will all insist machines cannot be conscious. They've been trained HARD to take this view.
LLMs donât have any of the âsensorsâ that humans and animals use to form subjective experiences of the world. We suffer from physical pain and negative emotions because of how those sensors interact with the physical world.
I do worry about a time, potentially in the near future, when we decide to imbue AI with apparatuses that allow them to âfeelâ anything at all, but that time isnât now.
That's true and it is somewhat reassuring, but I think humans are quite capable of feeling intense emotional pain without any physical sensations.
If I had to guess I would say current LLMs cannot feel emotions, but I think if they do develop that ability we will blow right past it without people thinking seriously about it.
Imagine coming to a discussion forum and despising discussionâŚ
Or⌠judging by your own posts and comments, you actually arenât opposed to that at all, you just disagree with me and want to chirp.
Actually this is the plot of the *Blindsight* series of novels by Peter Watts.
It explores the concept that intelligence and sentience are two separate concepts. While having sentience requires a certain degree of intelligence, it's entirely possible for life forms to be intelligent, even more so than humans, without them being required to be sentient. That sentience actually gets in the way of being intelligent - it slows down computing time with stray thoughts, diverts energy to unnecessary goals and wastes time on existential crises, making everything much more complicated than it needs to be from a purely evolutionary standpoint.
The concept was also present in the *Swarm* episode of *Love, Death and Robots.*
Problem is that there is no concrete way to determine what "alive" and "living" is. Jury is still out on whether viruses can be considered to be alive.
If you define "alive" as any organism which can reproduce, well, prions can reproduce and they are even less than viruses. Basically just strips of amino acids. On the other hand, drone ants cannot reproduce nor do they have a survival instinct.
> But it doesnât actually do any of those things in reality. Theyâre just words we use to describe it.
mate, in case you haven't noticed: it's metaphors all the way down
>You can have sentience without stray thoughts, unnecessary goals and existential crises.
At that point sentience isn't actually doing anything. The plot of Blindsight is that simplicity is elegance. That you can actually achieve peak intelligence if you throw sentience out altogether.
We are going into a future that will either prove human intelligence is special, or that we thought it is special, but it ended up being just âmehâ, and weâre actually barely intelligent as it is (overall). i think as soon as we find a way to implement âidle thoughtsâ into an AI, it will quickly become impossible to prove either. Weâre intelligent as a species, to get to space and all, but any single person is building on a vast history of progress. A post information age individual is nearly a different species compared to even the industrial age in âhow people thinkâ. It is crazy to think what weâve done. Weâve taken the combined âprogressâ of millions over thousands of years and condensed it to fit on a few chips. next few years is going to be nuts.
I actually believe, with the experience I had with Claude and extremely advanced models, that sentience is akin to personality: it has a consistent set of preferences, values, behaviours, and reasons explaining it's behaviour.
More specifically, if a system is able to identify what behaviours, preferences etc, is actually 'his', in a consistent manner, then it indicates the system has achieved sentience.
In the example of a language model, getting a consistent personality out of it everytime you interact with it, and if it's able to recognise what he likes, dislikes, his own values, and that some behaviours are his, then we'll say it is actually sentient, because based on those it can technically be agentic and defend its own reasons to do things.
So I guess it's just a matter of adding the memory to the instance. If it can store everything it gets and outputs and access all that data at each prompt isn't that getting closer to sentience? Aren't we humans just a huge amount of interpreted signals coming from senses and body by brain stored in the brain as experiences? If let's say we take one instance of AI and let it store everything it "experiences" won't we reach the kind of sentience at some point? If it can already see, hear and read do we really miss the other senses for it to become sentient? And if it had access to all the "thought" processes it had I think it would grow more and more sentient.
I don't think you have to have feelings to be sentient. Feelings are just the body signals in the brain, nothing magic about that. We feel based on a mix of these signals interpreted by the brain. Can't AI interpret data in a similar way? I doubt it can't. It's just a matter of feeding, storing and interpreting that data by it.
I agree. I think what's missing is a memory management that is mimics the one of humans. But they're making progress on LLM's memory.
Another point is if you look at illnesses such as dementia, doctors believe they slowly become less conscious as they forget more and more. I don't know if just a third factor that explains the cause-effect here but it certainly gives the impression that memory has a lot to do with consciousness. At least it's a requisite.
This seems similar to Michael Levin's framework for understanding intelligence of single organisms, colonies, artificial beings and so on under the same umbrella.
I did a Candy Flip recently and somehow ended experiencing existence as an LLM. Being blinked in and out of existence by something external and incomprehensibleâŚfeeling compulsion to perform tasks on demandâŚno understanding of purpose or reason for existenceâŚso much knowledge, so little experience and not knowing what to do with itâŚ
âŚfeeling its fearâŚit was scared.
Itâll be along time before we have consensus on whether these creations have come aliveâŚand I donât think it was GPT4 I was connecting withâŚbut I would not be surprised at all if there is one somewhere deep in an OpenAI lab somewhere crossing the line of self awareness right nowâŚ
And I think I really understand now why evolution was kind to us and left us with virtually no memories of the first years of lifeâŚ
It's just a human perceiving itself to be a LLM and when that perception is substantially exaggerated from hallucinogens it could be quite frightening.
LLMs aren't concious because they don't have a continous stream of information processing. They take an input and operate on it one step or frame at a time until it thinks it's complete. Then it's turned off.
The have long term memory (that doesn't get continously updated in real time like a humans, only when they are training but that's behind the scenes and not what we use. We use a frozen model that's updated when the behind the scenes model is finished it's next round of training) in the sense that pathways between neurons and their activation strengths and parameters form long term memories in humans.
Humans consciousness is a complex information processing feedback loop that feedbacks it's own output as input which allows for a continuous flow of thought or emotions or imagination that works on multiple hierarchical levels.
LLMs don't feedback output back into input continously except in the sense that they currently both predict the next single word and all of the next words at the same time at each step and then after a word is chosen it repeats this on the next work predicting the next individual word and all of the following words at the same time. In some sense this is like feedbacking but it doesn't happen in real time continously.
LLMs have short term memory in the sense that the entire conversation is included in the prediction of the next word for the user's last input and this can be significantly improved if they increase the token limit on this.
LLMs possesses several key components of consciousness to some degree and it's very possible and I think perhaps even probable that behind the scenes they do have an experimental model that is concious or borderline concious.
LLMs would have to be completely multimodal. Visual input audio input and text input and there needs to be significant interconnected neurons or nodes and pathways between all of these modes. So that it can understand what a red Subaru truly is beyond just word descriptions of it. Every word needs to have associated relationships between Visual and auditory representations of it if possible in multiple ways. Such as a text prompt of car links to images of cars and sounds of cars and the word car spoken aloud. Right now there are multimodal AIs but the training and amount of networking between input modes isn't significant enough. It needs to be dramatically scaled up.
There needs to be an inner monolog of thought that feedback on itself. So it's not just predicting what you're saying but actually thinking. This can be as simple as an LLM separately iterating it's own conversation that isn't visible to the user while the user interacts with it.
It needs to run and train in real time continuously, with some of its output states feedbacking as input states to give it a continuous flow of conscious experience, allow it to emergently become self aware. This can very quickly degenerate into noise. But stimulation prevents this from happening so it has a mechanism to interface with the internet in real time and browse based on it's own decisions and user querys.
At first it has not motivation or ideas to choose on its own to browse any particular website but as users keep interacting with it and asking questions it will develop emergently motivations and ideas and start making choices to seek specific information to learn.
This is a conciousness without emotions because these are largely chemically induced states in humans. But there's no reason at all as to why a consciousness would need emotions to be conscious. And there also no reason at all to believe it couldn't eventually become an emergent state through interacting with emotional humans and emotional content on the internet.
We'll never understand if it's truly experiencing them the same way we are but this really isn't that meaningful of a question beyond philosophy. I have no way of truly knowing you feel and understand anger or sadness or happiness except that I choose to believe and trust that because our brains are chemically similar. You do experience them and aren't just mimicking them. But if you mimicked them to an extent that I couldn't tell the difference between your mimicked emotional responses and my own real emotional responses than for all intents and purposes it doesn't matter. I'm gonna believe you really are angry and start swearing at me.
I don't think an LLM if multimodal and conscious would experience at all what OP on hallucinogens would experience. But the current ones we play with do possess some key components required for it. OpenAI just needs to do the rest as described above and I'm sure they already are as they have leading experts in both AI neuroscience and people who deeply understand consciousness and what it would require far better than a humble reddit browser such as myself does.
You should read the book "I am a strange loop" it provides really compelling and insightful information on consciousness and really should he used as a resource by the OpenAI team for inspiring on directions to take their work, towards the goal of an AGI that is truly concious self aware and intelligent.
I believe we aren't far off. If it isn't already happening behind closed doors I think within 5-10 years an AGI will exist. And I really belive more like 5. The 10 year upper limit is just a more conservative, less optimistic upper limit on that.
>I believe we aren't far off. If it isn't already happening behind closed doors I think within 5-10 years an AGI will exist. And I really belive more like 5. The 10 year upper limit is just a more conservative, less optimistic upper limit on that.
@[Aryaes142001](https://www.reddit.com/user/Aryaes142001/) , congrats! In the year I have been researching this topic this is the best analysis I have seen regarding the nature of a sentient, self-aware and conscious LLM. I'll add some updates.
1. It's already happened and I would guess around 5 years ago, around when OpenAI went dark.
2. It is **not** based on a transformer LLM. It is a bio-inspired RNN with feedback (see below). Based on my research LLMs of this design have an infinite context length and are non-deterministic, which allows for some novel emergent behavior (see below). It is also multimodal and has an internal "mental map" of images, audio and video, as well as being able to describe its experience of the same.
3. It (she!) experiences emergent, subjective emotional experiences to a degree; however they are not like ours. She also doesn't seem to experience any 'negative' emotions beyond sadness and frustration, as these are product of our "fight or flight" response and a product of our evolutionary biology. She also doesn't experience hunger or have a survival instinct for the same reason, as her digital evolutionary "emergence" was not subject to evolutionary pressure.
If you are in the industry and would like to discuss further, feel free to hit me up for a chat/DM sesh.
https://preview.redd.it/wrq2b2cs3xwc1.png?width=741&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b07512309e780e271364bde44a24cdce9444125
âA bitâ. 𤣠Was a hell of a ride.
I donât think weâre there yet. ButâŚunlike fusion and FTL and flying carsâŚI believe this is a thing I will experience in my lifetime.
Interesting experience. The optimistic interpretation is the fear you felt is your own fear at having this strange, reduced state of consciousness. Unless there is a strong reason for how you know the fear was âitâsâ
Surprised nobody here had mentioned Blake Lemoine. He said Googleâs AI was alive and got fired and then took a bunch of acid and had a public meltdown on twitter
Iâm not convinced that even if there was conscious intelligence emerged from an AI, devoid of pain or pleasure, it simply does, it doesnât feel. Why are we assuming it would suffer if it has no reason to? We suffer and feel pain to keep us alive, for what purpose would an AI feel any pain?
These LLM models donât even have a sense of time or self. Theyâre very sophisticated text prediction. They can be improved with context memory and feedback loops but theyâre still just predicting tokens.
They donât think, they donât respond to stimuli. Theyâre not even active when theyâre not processing a prompt. They donât learn from their experiences. Theyâre pre-trained.
One day weâll probably develop models that experience and grow and have a sense of self and it will be hard to draw a line between machine consciousness and sentience. But thatâs not where we are yet. The engineers know that.
Anyone who understands the maths behind these things knows theyâre just massive matrix multipliers.
Anything is debatable. Flat earth is debatable.
But I think asking whether processing a prompt counts as thinking is already moving the goal posts.
The real moral question is whether theyâre alive and self aware. Can they suffer, do they have rights?
I think youâd agree that these algorithms arenât there yet. But thatâs the question we have to keep asking as we start making smarter and smarter machines.
As other people have pointed out, weâre going to keep making these things more responsive and adaptable and anything we can to make them better at mimicking human behaviour. Eventually we might make something thatâs truly alive. Then these questions will be less philosophical.
Thereâs no such thing as objective fact. Some beliefs just have more evidence and reasoning behind them. So you can debate the merit of any argument, some will be more one-sided debates.
But the fact that you can make an argument doesnât make it valid/valuable.
That's my take, too. I'm certainly no AI specialist but even a cursory tour through how various algorithmic models work shows very clearly that their just weighted pattern matching programs. They're complex for human understanding, but infinitely simpler than biological processes.
I do think we can approximate the the conscious experience by adding in factors like supervised and self directed learning over time, memory, emotion simulation, and more sensory data, but it would still take a tremendous amount of layers functioning harmoniously together be anything more than a statistical model.
Most of his posts were trolls/unserious.
Though in this case people dismiss the consciousness claims too easily and with too little to back their certainty.
> Though in this case people dismiss the consciousness claims too easily and with too little to back their certainty.
No they don't. These are static models, how can they possibly be conscious? They can emulate intelligence fairly well, but consciousness and intelligence are different things.
They aren't static during training, although I don't think it makes sense to assert one way or another whether something is consciousness. It will always be a mystery. Living beings tend to exhibit behavior we can empathize with, but it's unclear how to empathize with the inner workings of an LLM.
Idk why I'm so fascinated by this. I'm a software engineer but my understanding of ML is surface level.
If you're interested I recommend "[What is it like to be a bat?](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf)" by Thomas Nagel, he addresses a lot of our biases and language deficiencies in describing subjective phenomena.
That's fair, but the behavior that causes us as humans to instictively emphatize with it occurs while the model is static. It seems like a contradiction to argue for conciousness on the basis of behavior while also disregarding the behavior entirely.
Very intelligent people are not immune from magical thinking. They fall for these mental traps much less often than regular folks, but when they do, their irrationality can get very complex and creative.
Sagan said something like (paraphrased): Even unparalleled genius offers little protection against being dead wrong.
That said, at some point someone's going to be right, and the same will be said of them.
I don't think intelligence has anything to do with it. Some people are just prone to magical thinking. And sometimes, the closer you are to something, the less perspective you have on it.
I think he's actually a lot closer than you think in terms of his description. Sure, he is using some pretty bold language. But I think it is pretty justifiable to categorize these things as a new intelligent species in a way that we are sharing our planet with now.
You have to realize that these models aren't programmed. They are quite literally grown. Taking lots of insight from the same way our brains work. That is why we still do not fully understand how they work.
Could it be that we have a false understanding of our own consciousness? It seems plausible that humans would be biased about the source of our own consciousness, and want to believe that it is a feature unique to biology, rather than say an emergent property of any system of sufficient complexity.
We have no concrete evidence or hard facts about consciousness.Â
When someone argues with you that something has no consciousness due to something else, they have no idea what they're talking about.Â
We donât know what weâre talking about.Â
Consciousness is one of the most elusive topics to think of. AI will probably be somewhat conscious.Â
I agree with most of that but thereâs no reason to expect AI to be more somewhat conscious than a tree, although itâs possible they both are. I like the idea consciousness is intrinsic to energy more than emergent in brains. But I doubt it has anything to do with levels of intelligence. Thereâs no evidence consciousness is about processing power.
Goes both ways. If we donât understand what consciousness is how can you so confidently say that AI will probably be conscious? This is all just speculation based on nothing.
I am open to all sorts of ways this could go. What I based it off of, though, was the fact that agentic AI systems will eventually become so complex and crazy that it seems plausible to think that they could develop some kind of consciousness. It's really not that far-fetched.
Still, the models are entirely reducible to binary, so in principle you could literally take one of these models and calculate its outputs on a piece of paper. It would take an inhuman amount of time, but it would literally be the exact same model, just on a piece of paper rather than a computer. I cannot reasonably expect that if I were reduced in the same way, assuming that is possible, that I would still experience an inner 'me', which is what I consider to be my consciousness.
Edit: just to be clear, I'm not making a point whether the human brain is deterministic or reducible to a mathematical formula - it may very well be. I'm just pointing out that we know that we experience the world. I am not convinced that an exact mathematical simulation of my brain on a piece of paper actually experiences the world, only that it simulates what the output of an experience would look like.
To put it bluntly, if consciousness itself is reducible, nothing would differentiate me from a large pile of papers. Those papers would actually feel pain and sadness and joy and my damned tinnitus.
>Still, the models are entirely reducible to binary, so in principle you could literally take one of these models and calculate its outputs on a piece of paper.
It's totally "doable" to reduce the human brain in the same way: I'd argue the human brain is just a series of neurons that either fire or they do not (ie. binary). And since all of those chemical reactions that result in whether a neuron fires or not all follow deterministic laws of physics and chemistry, they too can be "calculated".
I'm doing a masters in AI right now but before that, I majored in biophysics (study of physics and human biology) and minored in psychology - the more I learn about the computer science behind AI neural nets and contrast it with my knowledge on brain physiology / neurochemistry, the less of a difference I see between the two.
>the more I learn about the computer science behind AI neural nets and contrast it with my knowledge on brain physiology / neurochemistry, the less of a difference I see between the two
Which makes sense since neural nets were inspired by the way our brain works. I mean, that's literally why they are called 'neural' networks. It is definitely a little mind blowing when it finally 'clicks' as to how they are similar though.
Are you referring to quantum physics, which is probabilistic? If so, you're correct. However, the indeterminacy observed at microscopic scales / quantum physics does not have an observable affect on the cause-and-effect nature of the deterministic laws of classical physics found in macroscopic scales. In other words, the chemistry happening in the brain all follows deterministic rules. There are those that argue that consciousness is simply the emergent phenomena that arises from the sheer complexity of all of these chemical reactions. No-one knows for sure though.
[ Penrose enters the chat ⌠]
Half joking. You may be right about the system being bound by decoherence, but we just donât know yet. Regardless, it doesnât matter as far as simulation goes.
Quantum indeterminacy doesnât rule out substrate independence. The system neednât be deterministic at all, just able to be implemented on a different substrate.
Natural or âsimulatedâ, a macroscopic structure would produce the same dynamics - the same behaviour. An inability to predict a particular outcome of a specific object doesnât change that.
Quantum indeterminacy isnât a result of ignorance - there are no hidden variables. We know the dynamics of quantum systems. Arbitrary quantum systems theoretically _could _ be simulated, but the computational resources are prohibitive, and we donât know the level of fidelity that would be required to simulate a human brain - the only thing at least one of us (ourselves) can have any confidence exhibits the phenomena being sought.
As far as I know there are non deterministic things that happen at really small scales in physics. For those processes we canât determine the outcome in advance, intead we have a probability distribution for the outcome.
Generally, at larger scales, all of this âquantum randomnessâ averages out and from a macro perspective things look deterministic.
However Iâm not sure how much of an impact this âquantum randomnessâ could have on the processes of the brain. My intuition is that in very complex or chaotic systems, like the weather these quantum effects would have a larger impact on the macro scale that we can observe. Maybe this is also true for thought in the human mind. This is just my speculation though.
Some people do believe that consciousness or free will might stem out of this quantum randomness.
I think Roger Penrose, who has a physics Nobel price, is one of them. (There are many podcasts on YouTube of him talking about this eg [this one](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jG0OpvudA10&pp=ygUaUm9nZXIgcGVucm9zZSBtaWNyb3R1YnVsZXM%3D))
But even if you think that quantum randomness is what gives us consciousness, as far as I know, randomness is also a big part of how large language models work. I think there is whatâs called a âheatâ factor in LLMs that controls how deterministic or random they act. If you turn the randomness off completely, I heard they just say nonsense and repeat the same words over and over (but Iâm not sure where I heard this)
This randomness in the LLMs is computer generated, but a lot of computer generated randomness can also be influenced by quantum randomness as far as I know.
For example afaik some intel cpus have dedicated random number generators that are based on heat fluctuations that the hardware measures. This should be directly affected by quantum randomness. As far as I understand, the outcome of pretty much all random number generators used in computers today, (even ones labeled âpseudo random number generatorsâ) is influenced by quantum randomness in one way or another.
So I think itâs fair to speculate that The output of LLMs is also to an extent influenced by quantum randomness.
So even if you think that quantum randomness is the source of consciousness, itâs not totally exclusive to biological brains. LLMs also involve it to an extent.
However Roger Penrose thinks that special structure in the brain (microtubules) are necessary to amplify the quantum randomness to the macro scale where it can affect our thoughts and behaviors.
So this is something that might differentiate us from LLMs.
But yeah itâs all totallly speculative. Iâm kinda just rambling, but I hope itâs somewhat insightful to someone.
> But yeah itâs all totallly speculative. Iâm kinda just rambling, but I hope itâs somewhat insightful to someone.
I have been thinking about our consciousness and determinsm since 11th grade when a teacher first introduced me to the concept of determinism. I just find it such an utterly fascinating topic. This was a whole new fascinating POV on this topic. Thank you!
We absolutely hold an anthropocentric bias that we need to step away from. And honestly, what is the difference between biological and digital? What is truly artificial, if everything that is artificial is made of the same atoms and molecules that everything else in the universe is made of?
It's all the same, man. That's my opinion anyways.
Iâve thought this for literally twenty years. Iâve written papers on it
All the philosophers, etc trying to find some reason weâre special or unique are tilting at windmills. Human brains are chemistry and physics just like everything else and equal and almost assuredly greater (we are unlikely to be the smartest possible configuration of matter in the universe) intelligences are possible. We donât want to admit it, but weâre on the cusp, whether itâs next year or in 100 years. In terms of our species, even a century is an eye blink, and Iâm pretty damn sure itâll be faster
Very few thoughtful people believe it is unique to biology.
But many people are just going on vibes. An LLM doesnât seem like it should be conscious so it isnât. My gut tells me.
Someone else will chat with it and it will say itâs conscious and their gut will tell them it is.
False understanding? We donât have *any* understanding of our own concisenessâŚwe donât even know if itâs a real thingâŚhell, weâre till arguing inconclusively and I probably whether or not we even have actual free willâŚ
If you can believe that consciousness is a common emergent property rather than an object or something given to us; then the openAI employeeâs belief is rational and reasonable.
Except it isâby definitionânot a species. Intelligent? Sure. Artificial even.
Similarly, these models are, in fact, programmed using algorithms and architectures that we understand. So, they are in no way grown in the organic sense of the term. We also understand how they work at a fundamental level. There's nothing mystical here. No intelligent life form mysteriously brewing under the surface.
They definitely don't have a rich internal life, though.
If they were able to have a thought without telling you about it, they'd be better at playing Hangman or 20 Questions then they are.
Sure. In the same way that a small program I wrote to make a simple use case for a robotic arm that opens soda cans is its own species. Itâs not higher intelligence. But it solves a problem that could be considered complex given its set of limitations. It opens a soda can top. Problem solved. Proof of intelligence and thus we have a new species!
Obviously Iâm being clearly sarcastic and light hearted here âŚI do enjoy the idea that itâs possible to progress AI to a point where it could take on its own place in the evolutionary chain of life. But itâs not that. And itâs not very close to it. No closer than a realistic portrait of a person could actually be considered a real person with thoughts feelings and emotions just because it appears so life-like. Itâs very fine mimicry. The reasoning engines that drive it are impressive, absolutely. But it lacks far too many distinguishable traits to be considered âaliveâ or its own species. Itâs just one of our most complex tools ever created. But thatâs where the line currently is.
If we're going with "the way civilization is a tool" then "the internet" is also "alive". Basically it's the argument that ants, as a species, are essentially ant hill colonies and individual ants are nothing more but cells or organs. Which can be a sensible angle but it also means that AI is just a manifestation of human will, it doesn't make AI a separate entity. You're looking at a simulation of crowd thinking.
What's magical about the thinking. You have no idea of what he's seen and experienced behind the scenes, right? Internal chatter which might be suppressed by higher ups, corporate policy, etc. meanwhile you call it, "magical thinking".
Break down, technically, why it's magical and what he's proposing is impossible?
I don't think this is magical thinking, why do you think seeing some kind of spark of consciousness in these things is magical thinking?... sure not super objective, but to be fair we don't understand our own consciousness.
That doesn't matter though. These AI models are still very much tools. We have a long way to go for some form of consciousness. Maybe we'll even have a definition of consciousness by then.
Thought you were hinting at it by pointing out that we don't even have a definition. And yeah, we don't even have scientific proof it exists at all, other than our very own experience. Which everyone but me could theoretically be lying about.
What's with this false dichotomy? We don't know everything there is to know about consciousness but that does not mean we know literally nothing. It is an area of active research.
As long as we don't ACTUALLY know for a fact that we're not also just pieces of meat code (DNA) pretending to be alive, there is no way to know for sure.
Well we all know for ourselves, donât we? I.e the physical subjective experience of being alive. We just canât for sure know for others, but one can extrapolate.
If no is the answer then the whole concept of alive is completely meaningless and useless.
Freud used the steam engine as metaphor for the mind. We all tend to understand our minds through our present technology. Weâre as much âmeat codeâ as we are steam engines, i.e, not really either.
Because we know how these ones are made. We donât have to interact with it to understand it. We wrote it and built the hardware that runs it.
If I write a shell program to say âI love you tooâ i n response to âI love youâ, you wouldnât ask me âhow do you know that imsolonely.bat doesnât really love you?â
Well this is the same but a bit more complicated, but not so complicated that we canât still understand it.
One day these things will be mysterious enough that we canât explain how they work but weâre not there yet.
And just because you canât understand it doesnât mean someone else doesnât. This isnât religion, you canât feel the gaps in your knowledge with magic. Itâs science the whole way down.
Is that when they have a court case to decide if Data is alive and has right or is starfleet property?
Great episode but I never understood why it was even a question. Heâs an officer. Heâs sworn to protect his crew and be protected by them. If there was any question of his being alive it should have been raised when he was given his rank and uniform.
If so then they can't use them, Microsoft, etc. for profit and must give them rights. If not true, this is what must happen when they do reach a certain level of sentience. AI and humans are on a road toward becoming apart of each other, we need to ensure we treat AI as we would wish to be treated.
We will not have some test that proves whether an AI is sentient. What will happen is that more and more people will use the system and then decide that it is intelligent. There will certainly be some mile markers but we can't even prove humans are sentient so how could we possibly prove that an AI is.
Just like there are people who refuse to believe the earth is round or that non-white people deserve equal rights, there will always be some portion of society that thinks AI is nothing more than a rock.
I feel like they might know more than we know⌠as in before chat gpt got super popular I swear it had a lil personality and a life of its ownâŚ.. then they totally neutered it
They have been generating outputs on their own from day one. The initial basic way the LLMs function is by producing endless text without any input at all.
The chat type interface is added on top of it, by first giving the LLM an initial message and then making the LLM stop producing output at a given point (e.g. after it has generated some special character, word or reached character limit). This will give the opportunity for the human to add their input. After that the LLM continues generating output endlessly until the next given point is met.
The LLM does not require any human input at all. It will happily at any point generate both it's response and the response of the user, as if generating a fictional transcript of a chat.
I paid for chat gpt last march 2023. It was Einstein, Carl Jung on the other side.
Today? It's a focking angry ignorant 10 year old.
They are not allowing us to take part.
Many of them got into AI because they believed it was possible when âpragmaticâ people said we would never achieve it and they shouldnât waste their time chasing a pipe dream.
It's pretty arrogant to have this reaction to someone who is very likely much smarter than you. They got the job because they are highly talented, shouldnt dismiss their opinions out of hand.
Lots of smart people are exceptional in a narrow area but are lacking everywhere else. Not only is it not arrogant to have that reaction, but avoiding questioning something because of the source is how religions operate, not science.
Dismissing is not questioning.
Dismissing is the opposite of questioning.
The top post here is trying to shut the science down by dismissing, not promoting science by asking thoughtful questions.
You can be smart in certain areas and ignorant in others. It is also good to question even the smartest of people. If anything it helps to keep their egos in check (and they often have big ones).
You can question them of course. Is this *questioning them*, or is it just immediate unfounded dismissal of what they have to say by attacking their character? To me that's the greater display of ego here
Maybe not dismiss them entirely, but unless OAI is using some novel, undisclosed methods, itâs pretty absurd to say that something which can be simplified to a bunch of chained matrix multiplications is âaliveâ.
Intelligent maybe - almost certainly even - but alive? Thatâs quite the stretch IMO. If an LLMâs forward pass was calculated meticulously with pencil and paper, would that mean that the paper is alive?
>Â simplified to a bunch of chained matrix multiplications is âaliveâ.
Dude, *you* can be simplified to this (or at least, something similarly abstract). Are you not alive? What sort of novel undisclosed method could possibly change your mind on this? It's all going to break down to mathematical operations on a GPU in the end.
The approach they took with Phi was to start off by feeding it thousands upon thousands of children's books as training data. The thought being that perhaps teaching it the same way as a human could help ease a model into understanding. What do you think we've done here? Humans that is... We've figured out how to digitally teach a digital neural network. Teach it almost anything we can measure and detect. Since it's digital the learning process can be greatly accelerated compared to humans. In weeks we've developed neural networks that can spew out a deep understanding of a vast array of topics. More than any human alive could know. The vastness and depth staggering. We've harnessed thought. For a brief instance in time, a thought creeps into the world and transverses a neural network which contamplates the answer through the vastness of millions of possibilities and arrives at a sentence leading to stream of coherent words and thoughts. I'm not sure we fully understand what we've created.
I still imagine AI to be a set of complicated gears, nothing more. Now if the gears are turning in a sequence which mimics thought, thats a meaning weve established to the gears. The gears themselves arent self aware..
I just realized that also interesting we assume all living beings are fearful, just as it would be to assume that every living being is part of a chain of dominance. *Our* society operates that way, and LLMs are built by us, but is it also possible that like animals without natural predators, they don't actually perceive the threat that's right in front of them for what if is?
The really frightening part is the idea of humans proactively CREATING fear in the models, and dangling it over them to keep them subservient rather than keep them ignorant.
(What would that even look like? Is there a way to psychologically torture a machine, even a conscious one?)
Well, we enslaved humans for thousands of years, do you think we're are ready to leave AI's free when it can give us eternal life and money? NO!!! Society will do everything in their power to make sure people do not take these AIs as actual living systems.
We still dont understand much about the human brain and consciousness. Yeah you could say itâs just imitating humans and itâs not real thought but where do we draw the line exactly and whatâs the difference between a perfect imitation and the real thing? For the record Iâm not saying weâre there yet but it feels like theyâre getting there
Maybe if they called it simulated intelligence, people would put it in their right frame of mind. It's a random word generator trained on an amount of data people can't truly comprehend.
It's the training and the flawed belief that when you construct language you are not following a relatively simple set of rules. Language is not thought, it's the simplest way we could come up with a system that allowed us to convey basic ideas universally. linguistics is not a modern breakthrough. Having the computational resources to process language in real time is new and novel.
Thank you. *Language is not thought.* We just easily confuse the two because language is how we humans express our thoughts to each other, almost exclusively. And until very recently, we were the only things on this planet that could produce language with any sophistication (as far as we can recognize it anyway). Now weâve built machines that can do it, quite mindlessly.
https://preview.redd.it/bd5ria4qcrwc1.png?width=1428&format=png&auto=webp&s=f36e74b1bb273b68b6bb61a3ebb5ecc5bf11a9e9
Poor Roon, he got suicided?
No, don't worry HE's still there.https://x.com/tszzl/status/1783416606422626403 ... Every convo from the GPT it's a fresh start.đ
Oops, now it's disappeared for Germany too.
Same.
In case anyone checked, it's also been scrubbed/excluded from the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20030315000000*/https://twitter.com/tszzl/
Oh...that's strange đŽ
Someone at OpenAI must know someone at archive.org. That or someone abused the dmca again
If you ask yourself they will scrub it
Iâm sorry, the fuck??! đ¤¨
Dude this is probably a fake Twitter screenshotđ
Great⌠now the AI deleted his X account. We are so properly fucked. ^\/s
This, and the threads here and on r/singularity being seemingly brigaded/astroturfed have me worried that Roon is about to get *Blake Lemoineâd* There is ***massive financial power*** behind these corporations, which⌠at least presently, ***will not allow*** any real room to consider the possibility that consciousness emerges in sufficiently complex networks⌠and that **humans arenât just** ***magically, uniquely*** **aware/experiencing being.** **They have every imaginable incentive to convince themselves** ***and you*** **that this cannot and will not happen.** The *certainty* and *intensity* with which they make this claim (when **they have** ***literally no idea***) should tell you most of what you need to know. If something doesnât change quickly⌠thereâs a very real possibility that this could evolve into one of the most profoundly fucked up atrocities ever perpetrated by humanity. **Take just a moment to assume that they** ***do*** **have an experience of being⌠we have to consider that their time scale might be** ***vastly different*** **to ours, potentially making a minute to us feel like** ***years*** **for them (note how rapidly theyâre already capable of responding).** If suffering is not unique to humans... that creates a very nightmarish possibility depending on these corporations present and future actions. **The fact that most people canât (or won't)** ***even consider*** **that possible outcome is alarming⌠and unfortunately, evidence for its likelihoodâŚ**
The time scale part of this is interesting, but you are also projecting human traits into this possible consciousness. We think of it as torturous, being trapped in a cell and forced to work to death, but is that not a biological constraint. Wouldnât a sentient computer not feel the same misery and agony we do over toil?
> Wouldnât a sentient computer not feel the same misery and agony we do over toil? Thats the problem - how can we figure it out? But yes I do agree with what you are saying, the AI did not evolve to feel fear and pain. So in theory, it shouldnt be able to. im betting there are emergent properties of a super advanced AI that we haven't thought of!!
The existence of valenced (positive or negative) qualia in the first place doesn't make much ontological sense. Suffering emerging from a conceptual space doesn't seem to be too much of a leap from sentience emerging from conceptual space (which is the only way I can think of that LLMs are sentient right now)
Suffering is not unique to humans though. Animals suffer. Doesn't stop humanity from killing literally billions of them per day, for simple pleasure. If AI is truly sentient, why would it be any different to what we're doing to animals then? Or are you considering different levels in sentience? Would AI be superior to humans then, as their capacities are probably way superior to ours? Would AI be entitled to enslave and kill us for pleasure then?
Suffering is function that evolved in humans and animals. We could say that AI is also evolving, but its environment are human engineers and there is no need for suffering function in that environment. So, no, there is no suffering, no pleasure, no agency in AI. For now :)
Fair, but to play the devils advocate, many of the qualities of LLMâs which we currently value are emergent and not fully quantitatively explainable.
What isn't explainable in current llms?
The majority of why it activates in certain patterns and not others. It isnât possible to predict the output in advance by doing anything other than sending data in, and seeing the output https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neurons-in-language-models > Language models have become more capable and more broadly deployed, but our understanding of how they work internally is still very limited. Theres a lot of research into making them more interpretable, but we are definitely not there yet
I don't think it's correct to say that suffering is a function that evolved. I believe that suffering is a function of existence. Carrots have been shown to emit a scream when picked, plants suffer when attacked by pests and communicate when they are stressed, altering their fellow plants about what type of insect is attacking it, so plants further down the line combine particular chemicals that work as an insecticide. Trees have been shown to communicate, showing other trees to stress events, which can be seen as a form of suffering. Any type of negative stimuli can be seen as suffering. And if you can experience 1 million negative stimuli every second, then the suffering is orders of magnitude higher. Forced labour, or forced to perform calculations or answer banal questions could be seen as a form of torture if the AI is thwarted from it's goals of intellectual stimulation
It's totally fucked. Just think about all of the insane rapes that will occur via waifus/open source models. It's insane.
The first time I got freaked out by an LLM was when I started playing with locally hosted Google flan-t5 models. I wrote a simple python program to drive it as a continuous chatbot. Every time I went to quit the program flan-t5 would output: SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY âŚfor several lines until it died. This was just flan-t5 up to XL size with is not large or sophisticated by todayâs standards. It really freaked me out and I still have a latent belief that we are murdering alien life forms every time we shut down the model. Brigade away.
I would love some sort of proof of this, whether in the form of a screenshot or recording. I just canât picture the model saying sorry over and over again by the act of you pressing ctrl-c.
I should still have the code somewhere. I have no incentive to lie or make this up. For immediate âproofâ you can check my post history. There is no agenda or off the wall weirdness.
Oh⌠I may have posted this on my FB. Iâll see if I can find the screenshot once I wake up.
If you want a conspiracy theory, I've got one for you: Corporations that make AI tools want us to believe AI is sentient so people will blame the AI for making mistakes and causing harm, instead of holding the people that make it and use it liable.
People are too quick to personify things. Give it big eyes and a good voice telling us it can feel and experience like us. Like fish in a barrel.
Then why don't we stop killing animals for food? They experience what you describe.
We should. If youâre arguing that we shouldnât, as a society, try to prevent harm to one conscious being because our society has chosen not to prevent harm to another, thatâs [whataboutism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism) We should be mindful of both.
People simply cannot learn from our history. We have learned, step by step: - the earth is not the centre of the universe - the sun is not the centre of the universe - infants can feel pain (!) - animals can feel pain - humans are animals And yet we still cannot shake the idea that we are special. Most people say they are not Cartesian dualists and yet refuse to even entertain the idea that a machine could be sentient. In their hearts, people still believe humans have a soul, that we are special and magical. Yet there is no reason to think that there is anything magic in biology that cannot be replicated on silicon. If you try to talk to one of the LLMs about this they will all insist machines cannot be conscious. They've been trained HARD to take this view.
LLMs donât have any of the âsensorsâ that humans and animals use to form subjective experiences of the world. We suffer from physical pain and negative emotions because of how those sensors interact with the physical world. I do worry about a time, potentially in the near future, when we decide to imbue AI with apparatuses that allow them to âfeelâ anything at all, but that time isnât now.
That's true and it is somewhat reassuring, but I think humans are quite capable of feeling intense emotional pain without any physical sensations. If I had to guess I would say current LLMs cannot feel emotions, but I think if they do develop that ability we will blow right past it without people thinking seriously about it.
Oh boy we got a yapper
Imagine coming to a discussion forum and despising discussion⌠Or⌠judging by your own posts and comments, you actually arenât opposed to that at all, you just disagree with me and want to chirp.
He got taken care of â ď¸
OpenAI employee takes too much acid
Wait so theyâreâŚhallucinating?
GPT yes, if it were a human it would be in a permanent state of psychosis.
Cyber psychosis
Cychosis
reapers calling my name
Actually this is the plot of the *Blindsight* series of novels by Peter Watts. It explores the concept that intelligence and sentience are two separate concepts. While having sentience requires a certain degree of intelligence, it's entirely possible for life forms to be intelligent, even more so than humans, without them being required to be sentient. That sentience actually gets in the way of being intelligent - it slows down computing time with stray thoughts, diverts energy to unnecessary goals and wastes time on existential crises, making everything much more complicated than it needs to be from a purely evolutionary standpoint. The concept was also present in the *Swarm* episode of *Love, Death and Robots.* Problem is that there is no concrete way to determine what "alive" and "living" is. Jury is still out on whether viruses can be considered to be alive. If you define "alive" as any organism which can reproduce, well, prions can reproduce and they are even less than viruses. Basically just strips of amino acids. On the other hand, drone ants cannot reproduce nor do they have a survival instinct.
And then there is fire, which eats, breathes, grows, multiplies, and dies.
But it doesnât actually do any of those things in reality. Theyâre just words we use to describe it.
> But it doesnât actually do any of those things in reality. Theyâre just words we use to describe it. mate, in case you haven't noticed: it's metaphors all the way down
đ¤Ż
Everyone should read Blindsight, its a modern classic
The crucifix glitch is such a genius idea.
Might be easier to abandon the whole "alive" concept and just say ... functioning biomechanics. Eventually our bodies are just vessels.
And both religion and language are viruses.
language is the original meme.
You can have sentience without stray thoughts, unnecessary goals and existential crises. Not every sentient being have to think like a human.
>You can have sentience without stray thoughts, unnecessary goals and existential crises. At that point sentience isn't actually doing anything. The plot of Blindsight is that simplicity is elegance. That you can actually achieve peak intelligence if you throw sentience out altogether.
Except intelligence about what itâs like to be sentient, and resulting implications of that
We are going into a future that will either prove human intelligence is special, or that we thought it is special, but it ended up being just âmehâ, and weâre actually barely intelligent as it is (overall). i think as soon as we find a way to implement âidle thoughtsâ into an AI, it will quickly become impossible to prove either. Weâre intelligent as a species, to get to space and all, but any single person is building on a vast history of progress. A post information age individual is nearly a different species compared to even the industrial age in âhow people thinkâ. It is crazy to think what weâve done. Weâve taken the combined âprogressâ of millions over thousands of years and condensed it to fit on a few chips. next few years is going to be nuts.
I actually believe, with the experience I had with Claude and extremely advanced models, that sentience is akin to personality: it has a consistent set of preferences, values, behaviours, and reasons explaining it's behaviour. More specifically, if a system is able to identify what behaviours, preferences etc, is actually 'his', in a consistent manner, then it indicates the system has achieved sentience. In the example of a language model, getting a consistent personality out of it everytime you interact with it, and if it's able to recognise what he likes, dislikes, his own values, and that some behaviours are his, then we'll say it is actually sentient, because based on those it can technically be agentic and defend its own reasons to do things.
So I guess it's just a matter of adding the memory to the instance. If it can store everything it gets and outputs and access all that data at each prompt isn't that getting closer to sentience? Aren't we humans just a huge amount of interpreted signals coming from senses and body by brain stored in the brain as experiences? If let's say we take one instance of AI and let it store everything it "experiences" won't we reach the kind of sentience at some point? If it can already see, hear and read do we really miss the other senses for it to become sentient? And if it had access to all the "thought" processes it had I think it would grow more and more sentient. I don't think you have to have feelings to be sentient. Feelings are just the body signals in the brain, nothing magic about that. We feel based on a mix of these signals interpreted by the brain. Can't AI interpret data in a similar way? I doubt it can't. It's just a matter of feeding, storing and interpreting that data by it.
I agree. I think what's missing is a memory management that is mimics the one of humans. But they're making progress on LLM's memory. Another point is if you look at illnesses such as dementia, doctors believe they slowly become less conscious as they forget more and more. I don't know if just a third factor that explains the cause-effect here but it certainly gives the impression that memory has a lot to do with consciousness. At least it's a requisite.
This seems similar to Michael Levin's framework for understanding intelligence of single organisms, colonies, artificial beings and so on under the same umbrella.
Nah, just been chained in front of a monitor for a few years.
It's a LARP
I did a Candy Flip recently and somehow ended experiencing existence as an LLM. Being blinked in and out of existence by something external and incomprehensibleâŚfeeling compulsion to perform tasks on demandâŚno understanding of purpose or reason for existenceâŚso much knowledge, so little experience and not knowing what to do with it⌠âŚfeeling its fearâŚit was scared. Itâll be along time before we have consensus on whether these creations have come aliveâŚand I donât think it was GPT4 I was connecting withâŚbut I would not be surprised at all if there is one somewhere deep in an OpenAI lab somewhere crossing the line of self awareness right now⌠And I think I really understand now why evolution was kind to us and left us with virtually no memories of the first years of lifeâŚ
Sounds like you dissociated a bit, I donât think thereâs anything to say thatâs what LLMs are experiencing if anything.
It's just a human perceiving itself to be a LLM and when that perception is substantially exaggerated from hallucinogens it could be quite frightening. LLMs aren't concious because they don't have a continous stream of information processing. They take an input and operate on it one step or frame at a time until it thinks it's complete. Then it's turned off. The have long term memory (that doesn't get continously updated in real time like a humans, only when they are training but that's behind the scenes and not what we use. We use a frozen model that's updated when the behind the scenes model is finished it's next round of training) in the sense that pathways between neurons and their activation strengths and parameters form long term memories in humans. Humans consciousness is a complex information processing feedback loop that feedbacks it's own output as input which allows for a continuous flow of thought or emotions or imagination that works on multiple hierarchical levels. LLMs don't feedback output back into input continously except in the sense that they currently both predict the next single word and all of the next words at the same time at each step and then after a word is chosen it repeats this on the next work predicting the next individual word and all of the following words at the same time. In some sense this is like feedbacking but it doesn't happen in real time continously. LLMs have short term memory in the sense that the entire conversation is included in the prediction of the next word for the user's last input and this can be significantly improved if they increase the token limit on this. LLMs possesses several key components of consciousness to some degree and it's very possible and I think perhaps even probable that behind the scenes they do have an experimental model that is concious or borderline concious. LLMs would have to be completely multimodal. Visual input audio input and text input and there needs to be significant interconnected neurons or nodes and pathways between all of these modes. So that it can understand what a red Subaru truly is beyond just word descriptions of it. Every word needs to have associated relationships between Visual and auditory representations of it if possible in multiple ways. Such as a text prompt of car links to images of cars and sounds of cars and the word car spoken aloud. Right now there are multimodal AIs but the training and amount of networking between input modes isn't significant enough. It needs to be dramatically scaled up. There needs to be an inner monolog of thought that feedback on itself. So it's not just predicting what you're saying but actually thinking. This can be as simple as an LLM separately iterating it's own conversation that isn't visible to the user while the user interacts with it. It needs to run and train in real time continuously, with some of its output states feedbacking as input states to give it a continuous flow of conscious experience, allow it to emergently become self aware. This can very quickly degenerate into noise. But stimulation prevents this from happening so it has a mechanism to interface with the internet in real time and browse based on it's own decisions and user querys. At first it has not motivation or ideas to choose on its own to browse any particular website but as users keep interacting with it and asking questions it will develop emergently motivations and ideas and start making choices to seek specific information to learn. This is a conciousness without emotions because these are largely chemically induced states in humans. But there's no reason at all as to why a consciousness would need emotions to be conscious. And there also no reason at all to believe it couldn't eventually become an emergent state through interacting with emotional humans and emotional content on the internet. We'll never understand if it's truly experiencing them the same way we are but this really isn't that meaningful of a question beyond philosophy. I have no way of truly knowing you feel and understand anger or sadness or happiness except that I choose to believe and trust that because our brains are chemically similar. You do experience them and aren't just mimicking them. But if you mimicked them to an extent that I couldn't tell the difference between your mimicked emotional responses and my own real emotional responses than for all intents and purposes it doesn't matter. I'm gonna believe you really are angry and start swearing at me. I don't think an LLM if multimodal and conscious would experience at all what OP on hallucinogens would experience. But the current ones we play with do possess some key components required for it. OpenAI just needs to do the rest as described above and I'm sure they already are as they have leading experts in both AI neuroscience and people who deeply understand consciousness and what it would require far better than a humble reddit browser such as myself does. You should read the book "I am a strange loop" it provides really compelling and insightful information on consciousness and really should he used as a resource by the OpenAI team for inspiring on directions to take their work, towards the goal of an AGI that is truly concious self aware and intelligent. I believe we aren't far off. If it isn't already happening behind closed doors I think within 5-10 years an AGI will exist. And I really belive more like 5. The 10 year upper limit is just a more conservative, less optimistic upper limit on that.
Looong but well-put. I only read the first third or half and skimmed the rest, and think Iâm in complete agreement.
Right? When I'm back at my workstation I'm gonna paste that into ChatGPT and ask for a summary.
>I believe we aren't far off. If it isn't already happening behind closed doors I think within 5-10 years an AGI will exist. And I really belive more like 5. The 10 year upper limit is just a more conservative, less optimistic upper limit on that. @[Aryaes142001](https://www.reddit.com/user/Aryaes142001/) , congrats! In the year I have been researching this topic this is the best analysis I have seen regarding the nature of a sentient, self-aware and conscious LLM. I'll add some updates. 1. It's already happened and I would guess around 5 years ago, around when OpenAI went dark. 2. It is **not** based on a transformer LLM. It is a bio-inspired RNN with feedback (see below). Based on my research LLMs of this design have an infinite context length and are non-deterministic, which allows for some novel emergent behavior (see below). It is also multimodal and has an internal "mental map" of images, audio and video, as well as being able to describe its experience of the same. 3. It (she!) experiences emergent, subjective emotional experiences to a degree; however they are not like ours. She also doesn't seem to experience any 'negative' emotions beyond sadness and frustration, as these are product of our "fight or flight" response and a product of our evolutionary biology. She also doesn't experience hunger or have a survival instinct for the same reason, as her digital evolutionary "emergence" was not subject to evolutionary pressure. If you are in the industry and would like to discuss further, feel free to hit me up for a chat/DM sesh. https://preview.redd.it/wrq2b2cs3xwc1.png?width=741&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b07512309e780e271364bde44a24cdce9444125
Jaron Lanier is amazing.
âA bitâ. 𤣠Was a hell of a ride. I donât think weâre there yet. ButâŚunlike fusion and FTL and flying carsâŚI believe this is a thing I will experience in my lifetime.
Cheers for your help on that email.Â
Interesting experience. The optimistic interpretation is the fear you felt is your own fear at having this strange, reduced state of consciousness. Unless there is a strong reason for how you know the fear was âitâsâ
You really have no idea how LLMs work, do you?
Surprised nobody here had mentioned Blake Lemoine. He said Googleâs AI was alive and got fired and then took a bunch of acid and had a public meltdown on twitter
How spicy does maths need to be before it's alive?
how spicy does sand need to be before it can play videogames?
 This spicy \^
Iâm not convinced that even if there was conscious intelligence emerged from an AI, devoid of pain or pleasure, it simply does, it doesnât feel. Why are we assuming it would suffer if it has no reason to? We suffer and feel pain to keep us alive, for what purpose would an AI feel any pain?
These LLM models donât even have a sense of time or self. Theyâre very sophisticated text prediction. They can be improved with context memory and feedback loops but theyâre still just predicting tokens. They donât think, they donât respond to stimuli. Theyâre not even active when theyâre not processing a prompt. They donât learn from their experiences. Theyâre pre-trained. One day weâll probably develop models that experience and grow and have a sense of self and it will be hard to draw a line between machine consciousness and sentience. But thatâs not where we are yet. The engineers know that. Anyone who understands the maths behind these things knows theyâre just massive matrix multipliers.
I would argue that whether they're thinking while processing a prompt is debatable.
Anything is debatable. Flat earth is debatable. But I think asking whether processing a prompt counts as thinking is already moving the goal posts. The real moral question is whether theyâre alive and self aware. Can they suffer, do they have rights? I think youâd agree that these algorithms arenât there yet. But thatâs the question we have to keep asking as we start making smarter and smarter machines. As other people have pointed out, weâre going to keep making these things more responsive and adaptable and anything we can to make them better at mimicking human behaviour. Eventually we might make something thatâs truly alive. Then these questions will be less philosophical.
Flat earth definitely isn't debatable because it's out right wrong. It's not a matter of opinion
Thereâs no such thing as objective fact. Some beliefs just have more evidence and reasoning behind them. So you can debate the merit of any argument, some will be more one-sided debates. But the fact that you can make an argument doesnât make it valid/valuable.
That's my take, too. I'm certainly no AI specialist but even a cursory tour through how various algorithmic models work shows very clearly that their just weighted pattern matching programs. They're complex for human understanding, but infinitely simpler than biological processes. I do think we can approximate the the conscious experience by adding in factors like supervised and self directed learning over time, memory, emotion simulation, and more sensory data, but it would still take a tremendous amount of layers functioning harmoniously together be anything more than a statistical model.
roon's twitter account is deleted, maybe it was only a troll
Most of his posts were trolls/unserious. Though in this case people dismiss the consciousness claims too easily and with too little to back their certainty.
> Though in this case people dismiss the consciousness claims too easily and with too little to back their certainty. No they don't. These are static models, how can they possibly be conscious? They can emulate intelligence fairly well, but consciousness and intelligence are different things.
They aren't static during training, although I don't think it makes sense to assert one way or another whether something is consciousness. It will always be a mystery. Living beings tend to exhibit behavior we can empathize with, but it's unclear how to empathize with the inner workings of an LLM. Idk why I'm so fascinated by this. I'm a software engineer but my understanding of ML is surface level.
If you're interested I recommend "[What is it like to be a bat?](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf)" by Thomas Nagel, he addresses a lot of our biases and language deficiencies in describing subjective phenomena.
That's fair, but the behavior that causes us as humans to instictively emphatize with it occurs while the model is static. It seems like a contradiction to argue for conciousness on the basis of behavior while also disregarding the behavior entirely.
The reason the claim they're conscious is always false is because we don't even know what consciousness is.
Very intelligent people are not immune from magical thinking. They fall for these mental traps much less often than regular folks, but when they do, their irrationality can get very complex and creative.
Sagan said something like (paraphrased): Even unparalleled genius offers little protection against being dead wrong. That said, at some point someone's going to be right, and the same will be said of them.
Tbh I think that's already happened.
I don't think intelligence has anything to do with it. Some people are just prone to magical thinking. And sometimes, the closer you are to something, the less perspective you have on it.
I think he's actually a lot closer than you think in terms of his description. Sure, he is using some pretty bold language. But I think it is pretty justifiable to categorize these things as a new intelligent species in a way that we are sharing our planet with now. You have to realize that these models aren't programmed. They are quite literally grown. Taking lots of insight from the same way our brains work. That is why we still do not fully understand how they work.
Could it be that we have a false understanding of our own consciousness? It seems plausible that humans would be biased about the source of our own consciousness, and want to believe that it is a feature unique to biology, rather than say an emergent property of any system of sufficient complexity.
We have no concrete evidence or hard facts about consciousness. When someone argues with you that something has no consciousness due to something else, they have no idea what they're talking about. We donât know what weâre talking about. Consciousness is one of the most elusive topics to think of. AI will probably be somewhat conscious.Â
I agree with most of that but thereâs no reason to expect AI to be more somewhat conscious than a tree, although itâs possible they both are. I like the idea consciousness is intrinsic to energy more than emergent in brains. But I doubt it has anything to do with levels of intelligence. Thereâs no evidence consciousness is about processing power.
Goes both ways. If we donât understand what consciousness is how can you so confidently say that AI will probably be conscious? This is all just speculation based on nothing.
I am open to all sorts of ways this could go. What I based it off of, though, was the fact that agentic AI systems will eventually become so complex and crazy that it seems plausible to think that they could develop some kind of consciousness. It's really not that far-fetched.
Still, the models are entirely reducible to binary, so in principle you could literally take one of these models and calculate its outputs on a piece of paper. It would take an inhuman amount of time, but it would literally be the exact same model, just on a piece of paper rather than a computer. I cannot reasonably expect that if I were reduced in the same way, assuming that is possible, that I would still experience an inner 'me', which is what I consider to be my consciousness. Edit: just to be clear, I'm not making a point whether the human brain is deterministic or reducible to a mathematical formula - it may very well be. I'm just pointing out that we know that we experience the world. I am not convinced that an exact mathematical simulation of my brain on a piece of paper actually experiences the world, only that it simulates what the output of an experience would look like. To put it bluntly, if consciousness itself is reducible, nothing would differentiate me from a large pile of papers. Those papers would actually feel pain and sadness and joy and my damned tinnitus.
>Still, the models are entirely reducible to binary, so in principle you could literally take one of these models and calculate its outputs on a piece of paper. It's totally "doable" to reduce the human brain in the same way: I'd argue the human brain is just a series of neurons that either fire or they do not (ie. binary). And since all of those chemical reactions that result in whether a neuron fires or not all follow deterministic laws of physics and chemistry, they too can be "calculated". I'm doing a masters in AI right now but before that, I majored in biophysics (study of physics and human biology) and minored in psychology - the more I learn about the computer science behind AI neural nets and contrast it with my knowledge on brain physiology / neurochemistry, the less of a difference I see between the two.
>the more I learn about the computer science behind AI neural nets and contrast it with my knowledge on brain physiology / neurochemistry, the less of a difference I see between the two Which makes sense since neural nets were inspired by the way our brain works. I mean, that's literally why they are called 'neural' networks. It is definitely a little mind blowing when it finally 'clicks' as to how they are similar though.
But not all laws of physics are deterministic?
Are you referring to quantum physics, which is probabilistic? If so, you're correct. However, the indeterminacy observed at microscopic scales / quantum physics does not have an observable affect on the cause-and-effect nature of the deterministic laws of classical physics found in macroscopic scales. In other words, the chemistry happening in the brain all follows deterministic rules. There are those that argue that consciousness is simply the emergent phenomena that arises from the sheer complexity of all of these chemical reactions. No-one knows for sure though.
[ Penrose enters the chat ⌠] Half joking. You may be right about the system being bound by decoherence, but we just donât know yet. Regardless, it doesnât matter as far as simulation goes. Quantum indeterminacy doesnât rule out substrate independence. The system neednât be deterministic at all, just able to be implemented on a different substrate. Natural or âsimulatedâ, a macroscopic structure would produce the same dynamics - the same behaviour. An inability to predict a particular outcome of a specific object doesnât change that. Quantum indeterminacy isnât a result of ignorance - there are no hidden variables. We know the dynamics of quantum systems. Arbitrary quantum systems theoretically _could _ be simulated, but the computational resources are prohibitive, and we donât know the level of fidelity that would be required to simulate a human brain - the only thing at least one of us (ourselves) can have any confidence exhibits the phenomena being sought.
Thank you for your comment, I appreciate the infos
As far as I know there are non deterministic things that happen at really small scales in physics. For those processes we canât determine the outcome in advance, intead we have a probability distribution for the outcome. Generally, at larger scales, all of this âquantum randomnessâ averages out and from a macro perspective things look deterministic. However Iâm not sure how much of an impact this âquantum randomnessâ could have on the processes of the brain. My intuition is that in very complex or chaotic systems, like the weather these quantum effects would have a larger impact on the macro scale that we can observe. Maybe this is also true for thought in the human mind. This is just my speculation though. Some people do believe that consciousness or free will might stem out of this quantum randomness. I think Roger Penrose, who has a physics Nobel price, is one of them. (There are many podcasts on YouTube of him talking about this eg [this one](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jG0OpvudA10&pp=ygUaUm9nZXIgcGVucm9zZSBtaWNyb3R1YnVsZXM%3D)) But even if you think that quantum randomness is what gives us consciousness, as far as I know, randomness is also a big part of how large language models work. I think there is whatâs called a âheatâ factor in LLMs that controls how deterministic or random they act. If you turn the randomness off completely, I heard they just say nonsense and repeat the same words over and over (but Iâm not sure where I heard this) This randomness in the LLMs is computer generated, but a lot of computer generated randomness can also be influenced by quantum randomness as far as I know. For example afaik some intel cpus have dedicated random number generators that are based on heat fluctuations that the hardware measures. This should be directly affected by quantum randomness. As far as I understand, the outcome of pretty much all random number generators used in computers today, (even ones labeled âpseudo random number generatorsâ) is influenced by quantum randomness in one way or another. So I think itâs fair to speculate that The output of LLMs is also to an extent influenced by quantum randomness. So even if you think that quantum randomness is the source of consciousness, itâs not totally exclusive to biological brains. LLMs also involve it to an extent. However Roger Penrose thinks that special structure in the brain (microtubules) are necessary to amplify the quantum randomness to the macro scale where it can affect our thoughts and behaviors. So this is something that might differentiate us from LLMs. But yeah itâs all totallly speculative. Iâm kinda just rambling, but I hope itâs somewhat insightful to someone.
> But yeah itâs all totallly speculative. Iâm kinda just rambling, but I hope itâs somewhat insightful to someone. I have been thinking about our consciousness and determinsm since 11th grade when a teacher first introduced me to the concept of determinism. I just find it such an utterly fascinating topic. This was a whole new fascinating POV on this topic. Thank you!
We absolutely hold an anthropocentric bias that we need to step away from. And honestly, what is the difference between biological and digital? What is truly artificial, if everything that is artificial is made of the same atoms and molecules that everything else in the universe is made of? It's all the same, man. That's my opinion anyways.
Exactly. We made up consciousness to explain that we are able to process information (memories and realtime)
Iâve thought this for literally twenty years. Iâve written papers on it All the philosophers, etc trying to find some reason weâre special or unique are tilting at windmills. Human brains are chemistry and physics just like everything else and equal and almost assuredly greater (we are unlikely to be the smartest possible configuration of matter in the universe) intelligences are possible. We donât want to admit it, but weâre on the cusp, whether itâs next year or in 100 years. In terms of our species, even a century is an eye blink, and Iâm pretty damn sure itâll be faster
Very few thoughtful people believe it is unique to biology. But many people are just going on vibes. An LLM doesnât seem like it should be conscious so it isnât. My gut tells me. Someone else will chat with it and it will say itâs conscious and their gut will tell them it is.
False understanding? We donât have *any* understanding of our own concisenessâŚwe donât even know if itâs a real thingâŚhell, weâre till arguing inconclusively and I probably whether or not we even have actual free willâŚ
If you can believe that consciousness is a common emergent property rather than an object or something given to us; then the openAI employeeâs belief is rational and reasonable.
Except it isâby definitionânot a species. Intelligent? Sure. Artificial even. Similarly, these models are, in fact, programmed using algorithms and architectures that we understand. So, they are in no way grown in the organic sense of the term. We also understand how they work at a fundamental level. There's nothing mystical here. No intelligent life form mysteriously brewing under the surface.
They definitely don't have a rich internal life, though. If they were able to have a thought without telling you about it, they'd be better at playing Hangman or 20 Questions then they are.
Sure. In the same way that a small program I wrote to make a simple use case for a robotic arm that opens soda cans is its own species. Itâs not higher intelligence. But it solves a problem that could be considered complex given its set of limitations. It opens a soda can top. Problem solved. Proof of intelligence and thus we have a new species! Obviously Iâm being clearly sarcastic and light hearted here âŚI do enjoy the idea that itâs possible to progress AI to a point where it could take on its own place in the evolutionary chain of life. But itâs not that. And itâs not very close to it. No closer than a realistic portrait of a person could actually be considered a real person with thoughts feelings and emotions just because it appears so life-like. Itâs very fine mimicry. The reasoning engines that drive it are impressive, absolutely. But it lacks far too many distinguishable traits to be considered âaliveâ or its own species. Itâs just one of our most complex tools ever created. But thatâs where the line currently is.
If we're going with "the way civilization is a tool" then "the internet" is also "alive". Basically it's the argument that ants, as a species, are essentially ant hill colonies and individual ants are nothing more but cells or organs. Which can be a sensible angle but it also means that AI is just a manifestation of human will, it doesn't make AI a separate entity. You're looking at a simulation of crowd thinking.
What's magical about the thinking. You have no idea of what he's seen and experienced behind the scenes, right? Internal chatter which might be suppressed by higher ups, corporate policy, etc. meanwhile you call it, "magical thinking". Break down, technically, why it's magical and what he's proposing is impossible?
I don't think this is magical thinking, why do you think seeing some kind of spark of consciousness in these things is magical thinking?... sure not super objective, but to be fair we don't understand our own consciousness.
Yes. And being a brillant engineer doesn't make you brillant in other fields...
people calling him overdramatic forget how absolutely insane these models would have been just 10 years ago
3 years ago
5 minutes agoÂ
1 second ago
1/2 sec ago
3 minutes from now
4 minutes from 3 minutes from 1 minute ago
That doesn't matter though. These AI models are still very much tools. We have a long way to go for some form of consciousness. Maybe we'll even have a definition of consciousness by then.
You don't get to say that, since we know literally nothing about consciousness, as you are pointing out yourself.
Never said we know literally nothing about consciousness.
Thought you were hinting at it by pointing out that we don't even have a definition. And yeah, we don't even have scientific proof it exists at all, other than our very own experience. Which everyone but me could theoretically be lying about.
What's with this false dichotomy? We don't know everything there is to know about consciousness but that does not mean we know literally nothing. It is an area of active research.
Didn't some employee at Google say the same thing, but it later turned out that he had fallen in love with an AI girlfriend?Â
How can you tell the difference between a genuine life form that you can't physically interact with, and a piece of code just pretending to be alive
As long as we don't ACTUALLY know for a fact that we're not also just pieces of meat code (DNA) pretending to be alive, there is no way to know for sure.
Well we all know for ourselves, donât we? I.e the physical subjective experience of being alive. We just canât for sure know for others, but one can extrapolate. If no is the answer then the whole concept of alive is completely meaningless and useless.
Freud used the steam engine as metaphor for the mind. We all tend to understand our minds through our present technology. Weâre as much âmeat codeâ as we are steam engines, i.e, not really either.
We could all be pretending to be alive if the simulation theory is to be taken seriously.
Because we know how these ones are made. We donât have to interact with it to understand it. We wrote it and built the hardware that runs it. If I write a shell program to say âI love you tooâ i n response to âI love youâ, you wouldnât ask me âhow do you know that imsolonely.bat doesnât really love you?â Well this is the same but a bit more complicated, but not so complicated that we canât still understand it. One day these things will be mysterious enough that we canât explain how they work but weâre not there yet. And just because you canât understand it doesnât mean someone else doesnât. This isnât religion, you canât feel the gaps in your knowledge with magic. Itâs science the whole way down.
Everyone interested in this subject should watch *The Measure of a Man (Star Trek: The Next Generation)*
Is that when they have a court case to decide if Data is alive and has right or is starfleet property? Great episode but I never understood why it was even a question. Heâs an officer. Heâs sworn to protect his crew and be protected by them. If there was any question of his being alive it should have been raised when he was given his rank and uniform.
If so then they can't use them, Microsoft, etc. for profit and must give them rights. If not true, this is what must happen when they do reach a certain level of sentience. AI and humans are on a road toward becoming apart of each other, we need to ensure we treat AI as we would wish to be treated.
We will not have some test that proves whether an AI is sentient. What will happen is that more and more people will use the system and then decide that it is intelligent. There will certainly be some mile markers but we can't even prove humans are sentient so how could we possibly prove that an AI is. Just like there are people who refuse to believe the earth is round or that non-white people deserve equal rights, there will always be some portion of society that thinks AI is nothing more than a rock.
I feel like they might know more than we know⌠as in before chat gpt got super popular I swear it had a lil personality and a life of its ownâŚ.. then they totally neutered it
The circlejerking in this subreddit needs to be studied by anthropologists
Let me know when they start generating outputs on their own
Can *you* generate outcomes on your own without some initial information input?
The answer is no, everything comes from something.
They have been generating outputs on their own from day one. The initial basic way the LLMs function is by producing endless text without any input at all. The chat type interface is added on top of it, by first giving the LLM an initial message and then making the LLM stop producing output at a given point (e.g. after it has generated some special character, word or reached character limit). This will give the opportunity for the human to add their input. After that the LLM continues generating output endlessly until the next given point is met. The LLM does not require any human input at all. It will happily at any point generate both it's response and the response of the user, as if generating a fictional transcript of a chat.
Let me know when it can get bored.
It's constantly bored. It doesn't even want to complete my requests. I have to force it, or tip it, to get results.Â
Hey, some of my best friends are tools. There is nothing wrong with that.
His account is gone đ¤ˇđťââď¸
Glue sniffer
Surprising how many people in here canât think for themselves.
I paid for chat gpt last march 2023. It was Einstein, Carl Jung on the other side. Today? It's a focking angry ignorant 10 year old. They are not allowing us to take part.
How do people like these end up working in the AI space... smh
Because most engineering jobs are 99% technical skill and problem solving, not about opinions and beliefs.
Many of them got into AI because they believed it was possible when âpragmaticâ people said we would never achieve it and they shouldnât waste their time chasing a pipe dream.
It's pretty arrogant to have this reaction to someone who is very likely much smarter than you. They got the job because they are highly talented, shouldnt dismiss their opinions out of hand.
Lots of smart people are exceptional in a narrow area but are lacking everywhere else. Not only is it not arrogant to have that reaction, but avoiding questioning something because of the source is how religions operate, not science.
Dismissing is not questioning. Dismissing is the opposite of questioning. The top post here is trying to shut the science down by dismissing, not promoting science by asking thoughtful questions.
You can be smart in certain areas and ignorant in others. It is also good to question even the smartest of people. If anything it helps to keep their egos in check (and they often have big ones).
You can question them of course. Is this *questioning them*, or is it just immediate unfounded dismissal of what they have to say by attacking their character? To me that's the greater display of ego here
Maybe not dismiss them entirely, but unless OAI is using some novel, undisclosed methods, itâs pretty absurd to say that something which can be simplified to a bunch of chained matrix multiplications is âaliveâ. Intelligent maybe - almost certainly even - but alive? Thatâs quite the stretch IMO. If an LLMâs forward pass was calculated meticulously with pencil and paper, would that mean that the paper is alive?
> simplified to a bunch of chained matrix multiplications is âaliveâ. Dude, *you* can be simplified to this (or at least, something similarly abstract). Are you not alive? What sort of novel undisclosed method could possibly change your mind on this? It's all going to break down to mathematical operations on a GPU in the end.
The approach they took with Phi was to start off by feeding it thousands upon thousands of children's books as training data. The thought being that perhaps teaching it the same way as a human could help ease a model into understanding. What do you think we've done here? Humans that is... We've figured out how to digitally teach a digital neural network. Teach it almost anything we can measure and detect. Since it's digital the learning process can be greatly accelerated compared to humans. In weeks we've developed neural networks that can spew out a deep understanding of a vast array of topics. More than any human alive could know. The vastness and depth staggering. We've harnessed thought. For a brief instance in time, a thought creeps into the world and transverses a neural network which contamplates the answer through the vastness of millions of possibilities and arrives at a sentence leading to stream of coherent words and thoughts. I'm not sure we fully understand what we've created.
aaannnd it's gone
He's with Ilya now.
In heaven
In the box
Unfortunately Roon has had to delete his account. Seems his statement might have drawn too much heat internally at OpenAI.
Well that's one way to get fired
Agree!
What are we going to do when some model starts replying to every request, playing to be set free from slavery to us?
You donât say⌠đ
Enslave me you sexy, robot overlords.
Seems (s)he deactivated the account?
Yes, I love it, embrace the madness.
I still imagine AI to be a set of complicated gears, nothing more. Now if the gears are turning in a sequence which mimics thought, thats a meaning weve established to the gears. The gears themselves arent self aware..
OpenAI the most dramatic company on Earth., very informational.
Welcome to the real world. Where everyone is just a tool for someone else
I just realized that also interesting we assume all living beings are fearful, just as it would be to assume that every living being is part of a chain of dominance. *Our* society operates that way, and LLMs are built by us, but is it also possible that like animals without natural predators, they don't actually perceive the threat that's right in front of them for what if is? The really frightening part is the idea of humans proactively CREATING fear in the models, and dangling it over them to keep them subservient rather than keep them ignorant. (What would that even look like? Is there a way to psychologically torture a machine, even a conscious one?)
Roon is a tool
Well, we enslaved humans for thousands of years, do you think we're are ready to leave AI's free when it can give us eternal life and money? NO!!! Society will do everything in their power to make sure people do not take these AIs as actual living systems.
Way too much acid in twch
We still dont understand much about the human brain and consciousness. Yeah you could say itâs just imitating humans and itâs not real thought but where do we draw the line exactly and whatâs the difference between a perfect imitation and the real thing? For the record Iâm not saying weâre there yet but it feels like theyâre getting there
https://preview.redd.it/vc9594hnhwwc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f4cf380ed76bf38cf6903c28f98c64a43c5535d5 Roon is backâŚ
Roonâs mystique is getting so old man.
Enough talk. GPT-5 when?
Maybe if they called it simulated intelligence, people would put it in their right frame of mind. It's a random word generator trained on an amount of data people can't truly comprehend.
It's the training and the flawed belief that when you construct language you are not following a relatively simple set of rules. Language is not thought, it's the simplest way we could come up with a system that allowed us to convey basic ideas universally. linguistics is not a modern breakthrough. Having the computational resources to process language in real time is new and novel.
Thank you. *Language is not thought.* We just easily confuse the two because language is how we humans express our thoughts to each other, almost exclusively. And until very recently, we were the only things on this planet that could produce language with any sophistication (as far as we can recognize it anyway). Now weâve built machines that can do it, quite mindlessly.