Articles like this should approach topics on consciousness with more humility than is displayed here.
We don’t even agree on a good definition of what’s going on inside our own heads yet, what gives you the confidence to say that what goes on inside an LLM can’t be conscious?
Obviously, the LLMs lack the divine spark, so they can't be conscious. Same as clones, IVF babies, or half of all the twins.
Jest aside, I do agree. If you list out every prominent theory of consciousness, you'd find that about a quarter rules out LLMs, a quarter tentatively rules LLMs in, and what remains is "uncertain about LLMs". And, of course, we don't know which theory of consciousness is correct - or if any of them is.
With LLMs, materialists have got a silicone idol to worship. They believe that they know everything about this idol because they've created it, and at the same time they believe that LLMs have a secret sauce that makes it intelligent. Looking at how they are trying to extract intelligence from it reminds me of alchemists of the past who tried to extract gold from lead.
I have a pet peeve with the concept of "a genuinely novel discovery or invention", what do you imagine this to be? Can you point me towards a discovery or invention that was "genuinely novel", ever?
I don't think it makes sense conceptually unless you're literally referring to discovering new physical things like elements or something.
Humans are remixers of ideas. That's all we do all the time. Our thoughts and actions are dictated by our environment and memories; everything must necessarily be built up from pre-existing parts.
W Brian Arthur's book "The Nature of Technology" provides a framework for classifying new technology as elemental vs innovative that I find helpful. For example the Huntley-Mcllroy diff operates on the phenomenon that ordered correspondence survives editing. That was an invention (discovery of a natural phenomenon and a means to harness it). Myers diff improves the performance by exploiting the fact that text changes are sparse. That's innovation. A python app using libdiff, that's engineering.
And then you might say in terms of "descendants": invention > innovation > engineering. But it's just a perspective.
Suno is transformer-based; in a way it's a heavily modified LLM.
You can't get Suno to do anything that's not in its training data. It is physically incapable of inventing a new musical genre. No matter how detailed the instructions you give it, and even if you cheat and provide it with actual MP3 examples of what you want it to create, it is impossible.
The same goes for LLMs and invention generally, which is why they've made no important scientific discoveries.
I don't see how this is an architectural problem though. The problem is that music datasets are highly multimodal, and the training process is relying almost entirely on this dataset instead of incorporating basic musical knowledge to allow it to explore a bit further. That's what happens when computer scientists aim to "upset" a field without consulting with experts in said field.
Einstein’s theory of relativity springs to mind, which is deeply counter-intuitive and relies on the interaction of forces unknowable to our basic Newtonian senses.
There’s an argument that it’s all turtles (someone told him about universes, he read about gravity, etc), but there are novel maths and novel types of math that arise around and for such theories which would indicate an objective positive expansion of understanding and concept volume.
The point has always been the act of writing itself. What you write about is almost irrelevant; it’s that you spent the time writing, that you had ideas in your head, and that you squeezed them onto the page.
Sure. And my point is that the assignment is poorly conceived if an LLM's output can appear to "have ideas" that satisfy the prompt. Last I checked, they don't do a good job of modeling a specific, non-notable person within particular constraints, and then all the relevant life experiences of that person. An LLM essay should be human-detectable for the same reasons that one from an essay mill would be.
No matter how intricate and detailed an object is, it will appear similar to any other blurry mess if it's viewed through a shoddy lens.
I think your point stands for upper level work; however, at medium to lower levels, your counterfactual starts to weaken. The ideas have always been there, but it's the ability to express them--well enough to notice their presence--that is not.
Is that not pointless now? The point of writing was previously to communicate our thoughts and ideas to other people. Now and going forward that is unnecessary. The most efficient and effective way for us to communicate our thoughts and ideas is to have an agent organize and write them down for us.
It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool.
At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.
Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
You have strong dedication towards taking things literally.
The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but rather about expected token usage across a user cohort. When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at once; set the limit high enough to attract the aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a profit on the average usage across most users (you ended up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15 times a month after).
If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug, given that they can't actually sustain all their members going every day.
As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a "congestion externality in a club good".
Presuming that you yourself have "graduated" (what from is unclear), it's particularly audacious that you make this claim because it shows rather cleanly how poor a marker of quality an education is.
The answer has never laid in ever more elaborate designs to disenfranchise particular members of the population. It's always been in building community.
A community is what helps stabilize, helps tighten up distributions, and wrestles most authentically with the general premise that we are social creatures and only as strong as our weakest link.
If you think you're going to build the perfect society by way of careful electorate curation, I have some unfortunate stories to tell you.
The parent comment said high school which is compulsory, free, and a very low bar. Our nation and world is largely being wrecked by the malicious on behalf of the stupid. Having some bar doesn't seem unreasonable.
The fact that you read my comment and decided to clarify and double down is immaculate for my point.
Have you taken any class ever on disenfranchising events in history?
Also worth mentioning for those in these neighboring threads, the impulse to blame dysfunction during hard times on a particular minority of society has a name, you can read more about it here
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread around the human mind's processing of voice sounds.
As with most (all?) things we do, exposure is king. This is how we don't die from trying to process infinite dimensional reality. The brain compresses, it prunes. Things seem similar if you don't have much need to distinguish them.
Unless you've listened to hours of either NotebookLM or Greene, you simply won't be able to participate in the distinguishing of these voices with much ability.
People are bad at distinguishing strange voices in a lineup, yes. That is, anyone in this thread who hasn't heard much of either the NotebookLM or Greene's voice would be a terrible witness.
However, the equation changes considerably when the voice becomes familiar. You can imagine it like going from CPU to an ASIC. The brain is rather good at telling when a voice is your friend or not, the evolutionary pressure should be clear. Therefore, the people most qualified to speak on this matter will be first and foremost Greene and his podcast fans. It's a matter of exposure.
I think the point is larger than any individual. It involves the environment in which you're located. Infrastructure changes require energy, lots of energy. Increasing quality of life for most things we've built in our world requires investing lots of energy at the state level. You reap the benefits of this by living in the state.
Yeah, but even looking beyond individuals, my personal take is I'm no longer convinced, for example, all the massive amounts of electronics, fast fashion, and other consumerism-oriented production (which definitely do all use energy) are actually improving life. Same goes for a lot of online businesses that are occupying data centers and using electricity.
eg I'm unconvinced smart phones are truly improving life, let alone getting yearly incremental updates from every manufacturer.
So yes, to some extent, most life improvements are going to use some energy, but I wouldn't argue that most increases in spent energy lead to quality of life increases for a majority of people.
I think "reduce" has always been pipe dream by the de-growth sector. At its core I'm not convinced that humans can ever willfully engage in managed decline. When I say this I mean societies, large groups, cities, etc. Not individuals. De-growth has a serious scaling issue. It's fundamentally incompatible with the bedrock of why humans come together.
Maybe? I don't think this is beyond societies, but it does require society to expect it. The idea of reducing had an effect on society back in the 80s and into the 90s, people did reduce, but it didn't last. This is not "de-growth," unless you think growth is a measure of the number of people who live a life a leisure.
Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This ranks closely with “humans are not part of the ecosystem”.
You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.
We don’t even agree on a good definition of what’s going on inside our own heads yet, what gives you the confidence to say that what goes on inside an LLM can’t be conscious?