Its software. Software is not conscious.
Is a sperm conscious? Or an egg? When they come together the eventual brain is not conscious immediately.
They clearly are not conscious, they are just guessing what words should come next.
Consciousness is emergent. A human is not conscious by our definition until the moment they are. How will we be able to identify the singularity when it comes? I feel like this is what the article is really addressing.
> LLMs are word prediction engines
Humans can also do this too, so what are the missing parts for consciousness? Close a few loops on learning pipeline and we might be there.
And life itself doesn’t mean consciousness. And ultimately what is life? Something that has biological processes and reproduces? Why can’t we replace or recreate these processes with manmade equivalents to get the same results?
I find it strange that people are quite often unwilling to see animals as conscious yet here we are discussing if an empheral computer programme is. Have a think on why we don’t eat people but eat chickens - chickens are clearly more conscious than any AI, yet still not enough to stop them being considered food.
Cannibalism has nothing to do with it as some seemingly conscious humans have shown this behaviour in the past.
Anything that looks like intelligence will look like a prediction machine because the alternative is logic being hardcoded apriori.