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Today's Large Language Models are Essentially BS Machines
(quandyfactory.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Technology
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I apologize if I was unclear when I spoke of an internal world. I meant interior thoughts and feelings. I think most people would agree sentience is predicated on the idea that the sentient object has some combination of its own emotions, motivations, desires, and ability to experience the world.
LLMs have as much of that as a thermostat does; that is, zero. It is a word completion algorithm and nothing more.
Your paper doesn't bother to define what these T-systems are so I can't speak to your categorization. But I think rating the mental abilities of thermostats versus computers versus ChatGPT versus human minds totally absurd. They aren't on the same scale, they're different kinds of things. Human minds have actual sentience. Everything else in that list is a device, created by humans, to do a specific task and nothing more. None of them are anything more than that.
Have a look here. Key concept is the adaptive traverse, Tn-system then means "a system with that many traverses". What I meant with my comparison there is simply that a rock has a traverse less than a thermostat, and ChatGPT has a traverse less than us.
Addition, multiplication and exponentiation all are on the same scale, yet they're different things. Regarding number of traverses it's absolutely fair to say that it's a scale of quality, not quantity.
Sentience as in the processing of the environment while processing your processing of that environment? Yep that sounds like a T3 system. Going out a bit on a limb, during deep sleep we regress to T2, while dreams are a funky "let's pretend our conditioning/memory is the environment" state. Arachnids apparently can do it, and definitely all mammals. Insects seem to be T2 from the POV of my non-biologist ass.
You are a device created by evolution to figure out whether your genes are adaptive enough to its surroundings to reproduce
I’m giving up here but evolution did not “design” us. LLMs are designs and created with a purpose in mind and they fulfill that purpose. Humans were not designed.
In cybernetics that's irrelevant as the purpose of a system is what it does. I can design an algorithm that plays pong, I can write a program to evolve one, they might actually end up being identical and noone could tell.
It's entirely not irrelevant. Even if you create a program to evolve pong, that was also designed by a human. As a computer programmer you should know that no computer program will just become pong, what an idiotic idea.
You just keep pivoting away from how you were using words to them meaning something entirely different; this entire argument is worthless. At least LLMs don't change the definitions of the words they use as they use them.
Playing pong. Inputs: ball (and possibly enemy) position, output: paddle left or right. Something like NEAT will very quickly come up with the obvious "track the ball" approach using just as many AST nodes as you would.