And they will say things like the writer of this piece who says ‘we know how they work.’ We don’t, actually.

Okay, but we really actually do. There’s nothing magic about the kind of statistical brute force that these things operate on. The training stage breaks down and identifies patterns in the source data, and the operational model uses those patterns to “predict” what a person would say next. The patterns that these things identify are incredibly complex and can’t be easily traced or understood in practical terms, but fundamentally these are still stochastic parrots.

Especially if you want to go into the Christian context, no church is going to ascribe the ineffable miracle of life to a multiplication of matrices, no matter how many dimensions they have in the math.

Nobody who believes that LLMs cannot be conscious will ever believe that they can be conscious.

This is circular logic, I THINK what you’re trying to say is that AI skeptics are dogmatic and/or axiomatic in their world view, but if thats true you’re not engaging with any of the substance of what is being said.

And they will say things like the writer of this piece who says ‘we know how they work.’

The “writer of this piece” is not just some random blogger, but devotes a lot of his time covering the “scam” aspect of the current LLM hype-cycle, the title the website “pivot-to-ai” is in reference to the fact that a lot of the current AI peddlers, previously peddled crypto and blockchain as a deeply transformative technology that mere mortals cannot properly grasp.

Purposefully mystifying a topic, is more common as a scam tactic than you might imagine.

Anybody can do this - enthusiasts do it on their own desktops.

Minor note, but no, maybe some (with a fair amount of disposable income) can waste money on fine-tuning, training from scratch and the required large-scale theft, and large-scale compute time is out of reach of any hobbyist.

But what is happening that creates their emergent behaviors is a black box that we cannot see inside. We also don’t know what consciousness is and we don’t know what has it and what doesn’t other than that which our “feelies” dictate.

What can be called The Illusion of Consciousness is far more easily explained by human cognitive biases, than any reality of LLM functioning. It’s easy to be fooled by an LLM which echoes words back to you, you put meaning into your own words, and you recognize them when they are said back to you.

In the deeper sense, any meaning present in LLM output, is the meaning that the reader puts there and/or the meaning that survives from the training data, it’s not exactly that no meaning present, but it’s not the result of machine cognition, often incoherent and/or very lacking in substance upon close inspection.

I think to some extent this is a lost cause, but your feelings/fears seem to boil down to “this could be conscious!” (emphasis on could) I would invite to see if any other explanation can explain what you observe, is it actually the ONLY or even the most plausible explanation?

i don’t know your shitty whinging made it click but damn, it really is just Pascal’s wager again. “we don’t know if the spooky calculators have souls so better to act as if they dOoOoOo!”

so this is what arguing something like being seven means.

Dog, the statistical engine won’t fuck you, no matter how hard you try to lick its boots. Go outside and touch some grass, maybe interact with real people again.

The world “believe” is an interesting one used in this context. Anyway I don’t really believe that LLMs are conscious, though if they are, I speculate it would be bursts of consciousness to no consciousness between inferences, (discounting whatever happens in a training run) which could have interesting ethical connotations, but is most probably not true.