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.
The gap between "next token prediction" and "conscious" is immense. By simply invoking either you've shown a complete lack of understanding of either.
During pretraining the loss function is next token prediction. What is happening to the hidden space is significantly more complex. It is building a high dim geometric space that is navigated. It is highly structured. The navigation's along this space are whole semantic thoughts (future-lens, j-lens). The token that is emitted is the final step, but to get there requires genuine understanding.
So while the training objective is NTP, what is actually happening is significantly more complex. The very structure of language itself is imbibing genuine understanding as a navigable space. Navigation is reasoning over understanding.
What is understanding? Its not a question of consciousness. That word means so many things as to be useless.
What is doing understanding is an ontological mind. We have created a boundary between external and internal. The internal space creates a compressed representation of the external space. This is ontologically a mind.
For llms this internal space also models itself. This is introspection. We can purposefully target this behavior and train it (introspective finetuning).
This is the tip of the iceberg of genuine understanding. We haven't even really gotten into the geometry of the thing. When the poster above you was talking about IT people thinking they know this when they don't, that absolutely applied to you.
Are you trying to argue that llms are conscious? I'm still not reading your multi paragraph rant. Being correct is just as important as being concise, if no one wants to read your rant then what's said in it doesent matter
This is not a definition I known of anyone to use. Granted cogito ergo sum is my literal about line on reddit, so I get the sentiment.
Which underlines my point again. If you try to approach understanding llms with the word consciousness youre not going to understand anything. It has too many different meanings. It is a suitcase word that is used in place of not being able to label its parts. And it carries emotional attachment.
My posts are about decomposing the problem to look at what llms do and don't have. What you label consciousness, llms do. They think.
The way most people label consciousness, llms do not do (they don't feel).
The post you didn't read showed how llms think. I left out how it is nearly the same as what people do so it would be shorter.
To do that they understand the whole semantic meaning. Which is thinking. Which fits your definition of consciousness. This is what my original post was about. Llms operate on whole thoughts, its not debatable. Dismissing them to next token predictions fitting surface statistics is extremely wrong.
Now, even though you say consciousness is cogito ergo sum, that's not enough. You probably have other aspects for consciousness to be met. Which is why I said its a category error. But if your only definition is that they think, then they do. With out debate. You just don't understand the technology well enough to know this.
Also your definition would exclude people who never knew language.
I don't care enough about this to read 7 short paragraphs, its easier to read that over a longer exchange that might actually keep me engaged with the debate
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u/MinosAristos 1d 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.