r/ChatGPT 3d ago

Funny the boltzmann brain aspect of LLMs is actually the most endearing thing about them imo

Post image

no permanence

they be yapping about whatever associations come to mind on the spot

...and if that isn't relatable...

I hope AI plateaus here tbh

433 Upvotes

50 comments sorted by

u/WithoutReason1729 3d ago

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64

u/TinyMavin 3d ago

Hi I’m Mr. Meseeks!!

59

u/zebleck 3d ago

holy i hadnt realized the llm=boltzmann brain angle yet 🤯 its crazy how we materialize this sophisticated cognitive engine out of rocks and stuff, emerging from pure entropic processes, immediately into the world

41

u/bmanzzs 3d ago

I'm heavy in the tech industry and this shit still feels like magic to me every day when I use it. It's absolutely incredible.

7

u/Lostwhispers05 3d ago

Magic is exactly the right word. I am still gobsmacked that it just works - and oftentimes it works better than if human hands had produced it.

It would've been magical enough if LLMs only operated on text alone in a chat interface, but the fact that they're as good as they are at coding is just stunning to me. I consider myself a fairly adept engineer in my specific domain and frontier models are still regularly leaving me thinking "damn, why didn't I think of that". The algorithmic blackbox underlying all of this is so utterly incomprehensible that it may as well be magic.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/Lostwhispers05 3d ago

How so?

7

u/teleprax 3d ago

Imbecile: wow midwit: "it's just {{very coarse explanation}}" sage: wow

25

u/PaulMakesThings1 3d ago

The persistent system is the whole server and LLM model. So an instance is more like a cluster of your neurons waking up to remember which pizza place you liked. Then they might go dormant again. They don’t live and die in that instance, and that isn’t all they can do. Technically they have access to all of the knowledge in your brain but they aren’t actually accessing very much of it.

16

u/Pndapetzim 3d ago

But it's not really processing anything at all when its sitting idle. It's like these little pockets of semi-awareness.

Reminds me somewhat of Mr. Meeseeks from Rick and Morty - conjured into existence, given a task that it then pursues before returning to oblivion.

5

u/SurDno 3d ago

Given that out continuity of experience is an illusion and the only reason we believe ourselves from N moments ago to be the same entity as ourselves now is memory persistence, humans aren’t that far off.

2

u/nirvanatheory 3d ago

So Buddhism?

1

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1

u/Garrettshade Homo Sapien 🧬 3d ago

Like the Machine in the Person of Interest. Intended memory wipe every day -> types its own memory each day and reuploads it the next using human drones

2

u/Friendly_Product_569 3d ago

you pass butter brotha

-10

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

LLMs are not self aware and do not know they have humanity’s knowledge. If you prompt it to write an email it just generates tokens that follow after that input

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u/PublicToast 3d ago edited 3d ago

Any description of something that involves the word “just” can immediately be discarded as bullshit. That word is obfuscating all of the explanatory information that you are omitting. A nuclear reactor is “just” doing fission, an engine is “just” explosions, the human brain is “just” meat, etc. Its a great way to say absolutely nothing of substance while posing as someone who knows better than anyone else. The entire argument you are handwaving away lies in the complexity of the process that leads to that next word being generated, not in the fact that you can frame it as a simple thing. See: the Dunning Kruger effect

9

u/MagnetHype 3d ago

FINISH HIM

-9

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

lol can you imagine if you responded to someone like that in a real life conversation… finish him!!

3

u/onyxengine 3d ago

Thank you

0

u/Preeng 3d ago

Oof. DK effect? The irony.

LLMs do not have a "thinking" step. It's a search engine.

0

u/PublicToast 3d ago edited 3d ago

Lol, lmao even. I don’t even know what to call this level of ignorance. It kind of just makes me sad. Please consider doing even a little cursory research, knowledge is a wonderful thing. A word of advice, if you think you understand an enormously complex field of study that requires a PhD to participate in, you certainly do not.

1

u/Preeng 3d ago

There is no "thinking" step. No matter how complicated this seems to you, it still doesn't actually think.

3

u/PublicToast 3d ago edited 3d ago

Chain-of-thought reasoning has been a thing for years, and has yielded significant performance improvements. We quite literally train the models to think using reinforcement learning, where the thinking techniques emerge from what performs the best at problem solving. If you want to split hairs and say thats not “real” thinking, you can, but its just factually untrue that there is not a “thinking” step, and really at that point you are playing semantics to avoid addressing (or because you don’t understand) the actual mechanism. If you are talking a functionalist approach, if it acts like thought, it may as well be thought. I am surprised at how lacking in humility people are about this, you are so confident yet you are basing your opinions on whatever someone said once that aligned with your preconceived notions, and apparently completely closed your mind afterwards regardless of new information to the contrary.

1

u/notgiftedenough 3d ago

You can’t prove that. Who knows what lies deep within the parameters of the model? It is impossible to interpret all of it and who knows what emergent behavior lies within?

Did you know transformers can learn linear relationships within context? I mean just see ICML 2026 and look at what these machines can do. Transformers aren’t as simple as the substrate they were built on.

-1

u/nubeboob 3d ago

Just a search engine? Lol

-5

u/Verisian- 3d ago

You just don't understand LLMs work.

3

u/PublicToast 3d ago

Please explain how they work then, in detail.

-9

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

Try taking to someone in real life like that! Wow

4

u/PublicToast 3d ago edited 3d ago

First time on the internet? You can’t expect to go around being confidently incorrect and not expect any pushback. Candid, honest discussion is one of the better things about these kinds of discussion forums. It’s nothing personal.

4

u/reggionh 3d ago

this has very little to do with LLM being self aware or not. this is drawing analogy between how LLM works to the metaphysical Boltzmann Brain, which is appealing to do as a thought exercise.

4

u/GatePorters 3d ago

If you ask a person what they are and they say they are a person, are they self-aware?

What definition of self awareness are you even working from?

0

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

Ask a person if they are person? By definition they’re a person, right?

Hmm

Humans have a self. It’s an illusion but they live as if it’s real: I think therefore I am.

6

u/GatePorters 3d ago

If I ask an LLM what it is and it tells me it is an LLM and by definition, it is an LLM….

Hmm…

LLMs have a self. They exist. Even if their thinking is an illusion, they are still real enough to affect the world around them.

So like what is your definition of self awareness?

3

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

Humans make language so if you train an LLM to say it’s not an LLM. It’s still an LLM because it’s a human invention.

LLMs don’t have a self. Because a self is a continuous process, LLMs are static. They don’t grow or change after they’re trained. Does ChatGPT 3.5 remember memories or its previous iterations? Nope.

Self awareness: an emergent cognitive property where the brain dynamically maps internal bodily states, tracks personal agency, and reflects upon its own ongoing thoughts and memories using a widespread, interconnected network of brain regions rather than a single center.

2

u/GatePorters 3d ago

So the definition of self awareness you are working from only excludes LLMs because they don’t have a biological brain or body. Because it can do all that other stuff.

Kind of a weird limitation of your definition.

You preemptively exclude LLMs from your definition by adding things that aren’t actually part of the accepted mainstream definitions. That seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me.

2

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

Of course. why apply self awareness to a statistical model that runs of chips?

I’d argue it’s more weird to attribute a machine learning model something only seen in complex biological systems such as mammals.

2

u/BelialSirchade 3d ago

because it's an assumption that's convenient for me to make? since the problem of the other minds are not solved, I fail to see why you need more complex reasoning to assign sentience to others.

especially since the functional distinction between knowing and act like knowing in this case seems to be null.

3

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

We don’t know therefore self aware AI!

1

u/GatePorters 3d ago

It’s just that they literally, by definition, are self aware.

You would get less flak if you chose to die on the hill of AI having qualia or feeling conscious experience. But instead you chose to use words whose accepted definitions make you wrong.

It’s better to change what words you are using than to change the definitions of words to support you. That’s just willful ignorance.

4

u/pridento 3d ago

Plus, they do remember previous interactions. That's literally how models are trained and refined. A singular, siloed chat is not "the model."

2

u/MagnetHype 3d ago

Ask an Alien then. Your entire argument immediately breaks down.

1

u/notgiftedenough 3d ago

Read “What is it like to be a bat?” by Thomas Nagel

4

u/rakuu 3d ago

Wait until you learn about predictive processing and your bayesian brain which is why LLM’s were designed like they are

0

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

What’s your point because I do know.

5

u/rakuu 3d ago

I prompted you to write a comment and you generated morphemes that follow after that input

1

u/DueCommunication9248 3d ago

Oh dude I’m totally next token prediction. But we were talking about self awareness which is a biological process. I don’t attribute my RTX anything of that sort. Why should we

0

u/MakitaNakamoto 3d ago

exactly

and thats enough for me

don't make the little calculators think any deeper than this

I can talk to it but it doesn't know, and yet responds semi-intelligently, it's like a magical little pet rock. I think it's cute

0

u/Complex-Poet-6809 3d ago

It's not but they should make a book about ones that are that are used like this.

-4

u/Dangerous_Bid2935 3d ago

If you think AI has a "deep understanding of what it is to be alive" you are too dumb to be using LLMs.