Since they're modelling our own languages, people get spooked and start bringing up theory of mind.
In view of that, could you please clarify: are you saying that the OP's own brain is doing something that could be represented with a "matrix multiplication"?
I.e., they could only make that claim if they knew that their own brain (which is presumably the only verifiable instance of consciousness they know of) did something that couldn't be done with "matrix multiplications".
I think you should not try to interpret in that way and only stick to what the other person has said, otherwise we will all lose the thread of the conversation.
In any case, nobody here has said anything about brains having, or not having, to do something with matrix multiplication, except for your comment, so I still don't understand what you are saying.
Are you saying that the OP's brain is doing "something that couldn't be done with "matrix multiplications", or are you saying it isn't doing something like that?
He is saying neither. He is observing that OP has introduced the assumption that their brain is doing something that can't be done with matrix multiplication and is pointing out that there is no evidence to back such an assumption up.
> but now somehow the collective has moved on to believing that matrix multiplication is sentient
The OP clearly feels that matrix multiplication is insufficient for sentience. Presumably the OP views themselves and other humans as sentient. Therefore the OP is implying that human brains do things which cannot be reduced to or wholly represented by matrix multiplication (plus the various nonlinear activation functions and other implementation details of current ML models).
That seems like a highly suspect assumption.
Where was this assumption, about the brain and matrix multiplication, introduced? As far as I can tell, "the brain" was introduced to the conversation by mckirk, not the OP.
>> That seems like a highly suspect assumption.
Which one? Can you please quote from the OP's comment? You and the other poster are constantly bringing up things that someone is supposed to have said, but that nobody has said yet, in this thread, and it is very confusing.
To borrow the religion analogy, there's the opposite fallacy of claiming the negative case "I know for a fact God isn't real", by stating you know what these kinds of information processing systems are doing fundamentally cannot yield intelligence or some kind of consciousness.
In any case, at some point one has to observe that the people who are leaning most heavily on agnosticism (the fact that we don't know what intelligence is) are the ones who say that we can't say whether those LLMs are intelligent or not because we don't know what intelligence is. In other words, agnostitism itself is used as evidence: we can't define intelligence, the thinking goes, therefore LLMs may be intelligent. There is no other evidence of any sort that LLMs may be intelligent (or any number of synonyms).
Note that this is exactly Russel's Teapot:
Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.
Other than all the downright uncanny output.
Personally I doubt current LLMs are sufficient for sentience but that's purely a hunch on my part. Many people such as yourself seem quite overconfident of something that feels like a form of human exceptionalism to me - the idea that such a simple bit of math couldn't possibly be sufficient for sentience. As far as I can tell such a belief is wholly unfounded.
Instead of trying to guess what I think, why not ask me directly, and say what you think, also? Just throwing around weird accusations of half-explained "overconfidence", or "human exceptionalism" (what is that, now?) doesn't really help anyone understand what you are disagreeing with, or what you are agreeing with.
>> Other than all the downright uncanny output.
I don't find the output of ChatGPT, or any other of the language models that have exploded into the hype zone lately "uncanny". I've done plenty of language modelling and while the output of those recent LLMs is grammatically smoother than earlier systems, and they can handle longer-term dependencies, they are not anything new. Their output is "uncanny" only if you've never seen anything like that before. Which is, of course, the case with most people who didn't know about language modelling before they heard about GPT-something, and who are now posting in droves on the web to say how surprised they are.
You made a claim ("a model based purely on such simple math surely can't develop sentience/consciousness") without any proof, and while doing so ridiculed people that might believe otherwise.
It's annoyingly arrogant to assume people could only be impressed having ignored that.
It's impressive to me not by ignoring that at all. Matrix multiplication is apparently capable of producing poetry, jokes, insults, abstract ideas, etc (to some level at least) - but in your mind it's a pixar movie? Words arise from a team of angels pulling levers?
Fascination is not from thinking LLM are advanced as us - fascination is from wondering how much more complicated are we than that?
But I think you are quite wrong to suggest that this technology does not exhibit some type of intelligence.
I guess it depends on how you define intelligence but I don’t see why you’d link it in with consciousness, especially considering that simple algorithms are often described as “intelligent”