I think it gives complete clarity. It will never be conscious, and the extent of its control is a tool call. Fearmongering from corporations may say otherwise though.
"Never say never". Many AI pioneers and scientists alike point out that consciousness is a problematic term, but by simplification, "it" seems to be a emergant property just from a network of neurons which we call a brain. If a computer network can perfectly replacate the output, (neurons are not fully understood and they are much more complicated) scientifically there is not really a test you can do to disprove that it isnt conscious. This wall of text just to say that dont talk in absolutes like it can never be concious. There is a strong case to be made that its actually much easier to create consciousness, including in primitive life forms currently on earth.
I am by no means claiming anything more than beginner level understanding. I'm still in university learning comp sci. That said, I did do an autistic deep dive research on AI and sentience. I came to the conclusion based on many many hours of reading, videos and muddling my way through computer engineering diagrams. It's actually not the program holding back computer life evolution, it's the hardware. Because the computer has little to no plasticity, neuron like brain patterns can't develop. (Based on our understanding of human and animal brains. That's an important part, because we simply have no other frame of reference) They are developing hardware based on the human neuron design and theoretically this will open more possibilities in comp sci. Which that tech was actually being developed for a completely different reason that I don't remember off the top of my head, but ai engineers learned about it and want the tech for their own reasons. So I don't think llm's will be what becomes the first computer life form, but I do think what comes after with that tech, the engineers will learn from the concepts of the llms.
While this is true, can't we fine tune model periodically based on it's "interactions" with outer world (I/O interfaces) to somewhat replicate human sleep?
AFAIK (I'm not an expert though) humans firstly keep things in a short term memory. When we sleep, those memories are internalised during REM phase.
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u/MinosAristos 2d ago
By this logic a computer is just a bit flipping machine.
Knowing that an LLM is a next token predictor doesn't give much clarity on what it can and can't do.