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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

Good example.

It’s also like saying our brains are just electric circuitry incorporated in meat. It’s true but it seems that consciousness emerges from this.

The fact that LLMs are next token predictors isn’t the interesting or impressive part. Actually my brain strictly is a black box predicting (or choosing) my next word/action/move… based on a complex existing context (my thoughts, the environment, my physical state, my senses…).

FWIW, I don’t believe LLMs are sentient, but I don’t think either that we have enough knowledge to rule it out.

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That is the point: our minds are also next-„token“-predictors, at least we can‘t prove they‘re not. That‘s why I don‘t agree with the article: LLMs _are_ next-token predictors. However, that says little about their capabilities. Also, while I have no idea what „consciousness“ is, I have difficulties believing that it could arise in a program that, in theory, you could execute with pen and paper.

We also can't prove that our minds aren't machine elf meat puppets. Come on. Please.

> our minds are also next-„token“-predictors, at least we can‘t prove they‘re not

Your mind can pick a random number without outputting it, participate in a short conversation, and then say the number.

> It’s true

It's not. "Brains as electrical circuits" is a gross simplification based on our ignorance and prejudices. (In the 18th century they spoke of brains as "clockwork mechanisms".)

LLMs, in contrast, are literally next token predictors. We know exactly how LLMs work, and they are exactly that.

> We know exactly how LLMs work

I think you imply a rather loose standard for "exactly" here. I wouldn't even say this of major deterministic software projects that are orders of magnitude smaller than frontier LLM weight-dumps. In principle we could work our way through these systems eventually, sure, maybe even a single person could do so. But if we really understand exactly how our software works, how have we been tolerating bugs that lay dormant for years before being discovered by AI-assisted processes?

Oh that’s ez, for software we know that has bugs, one reason could be the cost of fixing isn’t worth it.

When we're speaking mechanically, we can ignore the weights and just look at the math. And that math is very simple compared to most software.

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