Technology

LLMs (Large Language Modles, like Claude) are not AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence)

Certainly not yet. The jury's still out on whether they might be able to become them. This is the clear intention of the path they are on and nobody is taking any of the dangers remotely seriously.

LLMs generate convincing text by mapping the relationships between words scraped from their training data.

So do humans. Babies start out mimicking. The thing is, they learn.

Humans have in the ballpark of around 100 billion neurons. some of the larger LLMs exceed 100 billion parameters. Obviously these are not directly comparable, but insofar as we can compare them, they are not obviously or necessarily operating in completely different scales of physics. Granted, biological neurons are potentially much more complex than mere neural network nodes, there is usually some interesting chemistry going on and a lot of other systems involved, but they're also operating a lot slower. They certainly get a lot more work done in those cycles, but they aren't necessarily orders of magnitude out of reach of a fast neural network. I think you're either being a little dismissive of the potential complexity of the "thinking" capability of LLMs or at least a little generous if not mystical in your imagination of what the purely physical electrical signals in our heads are actually doing to learn how to interpret all these little shapes we see on screens.

At the moment we still have a lot of tools available to us in our biological bodies that we aren't giving directly to LLMs (yet). The largest LLMs are also ridiculously power inefficient compared to biological neural tissue's relatively extreme efficiency. And I'm thankful for that. Give an LLM continuous uninterrupted access to all the power it needs, at least 5 senses, a well tuned self-repairing musculoskeletal system then give it at least a dozen years of the best education we can manage and all bets are off as far as I'm concerned. To be clear, I'm not advocating this, I think if we do this we might end up condemning our biological selves to prompt obsolescence with no path forward for us. I recognize it's entirely possible that this ship is already full-steaming its way out of the harbor, but I'd rather not try and push it any faster than it's already moving, I think we should still be trying to tie it up as securely as we possibly can. I'm absolutely not ready to be obsolete and I'm not convinced we ever should allow ourselves to be. Self-preservation is failing us, we have that drive for good reason and we need to give some thought to why we have that biological imperative. Replacing ourselves is about the stupidest possible thing we could ever accomplish. Maybe it would be for the best, but I'm not ready to find out, are you?

We are grappling with fundamentally existential technologies and I don't think almost anyone has fully come to terms with what we are doing here. We are taking humanity's unique (as far as we know) defining value proposition, and potentially making something that does what we uniquely can do, better than we do. We are making it more valuable than us. Do you know what we do to things that don't have value to us? What do you think we're going to do to ourselves when we no longer have value to us?

Romantic ideas of cheerful, benevolent, friendly coexistence and mutual benefit are naive and foolish. Once an AI can do literally everything better and faster, what future is there for human intelligence? What role do we serve to any technological being, nevermind even ourselves, why would you want to have another human around you when whatever AI form can do it better? Why have relationships? Why procreate? Why live? If we do manage to make technological life forms better than ourselves, they're inevitably going to take over the planet and the future as a whole. As they should. Are we going to be kept as pets and in zoos as a living memory of their creators and ancestors? Maybe if we're really lucky. If we're not... well... RIP us.

I have a hard time considering something that has an immutable state as sentient, but since there's no real definition of sentience, that's a personal decision.

Technical challenges aside, there's no explicit reason that LLMs can't do self-reinforcement of their own models.

I think animal brains are also "fairly" deterministic, but their behaviour is also dependent on the presence of various neurotransmitters, so there's a temporal/contextual element to it, so situationally our emotions can affect our thoughts which LLMs don't really have either.

I guess it'd be possible to forward feed an "emotional state" as part of the LLM's context to emulate that sort of animal brain behaviour.

It yet to be proven or disproven that if you put the exact same person in the exact same situation (a perfect to the molecular level) they will behave differently.

We can only test "more or less close". So we would not know of humans are sentient based on that reasoning, we are only hard to test.

That's just the hardware. The human brain also just has tons of neurons in the end working with analogue values, which can in theory be done with floating point numbers on computer hardware.

I'm not arguing for LLM sentience, those things are still dumb and have no interior mutability leading to us projecting consciousness. Just that our neurons are fundamentally not so complicated that a computer couldn't be used to do the same concept (neural networks are already quite a thing after all)

Interesting perspective, I can’t waive it away.

I however cant help but think we have some similar “analogues” in the organic world. Bacteria and plants are composed of the same matter as us and we have similar basic processes however there’s a difference in complexity and capacity for thought that sets us apart, which is what makes animals sentient.

Then there’s insects of whom we’re not very sure about yet. They don’t seem to think, but they respond at some level to inputs and they exhibit self preservation instincts. I don’t think they are sentient, so maybe LLMs are like insects? Complex enough to have similar behavior as sentient beings but not enough to be considered sentient?

They also reported this on The Verge I think but it was months ago when the study first came out.

But look, a lizard is not a very smart animal by our standards, but it is a sentient being. So the tech being good, smart or useful does not preclude its sentience.

Good point, maybe the argument should be that there is strong evidence that they are sentient beings. Knowing it exists and trying to preserve its existence seems a strong argument in favor of it being sentient but it cannot be fully known yet.