I got a bit lost in the comment thread for that article, but I don't understand why LLMs are not considered self referential... They are auto regressive as one of the commenters pointed out, and Scott just sort of waved his hand and said that if auto regression is sufficient then things like Conway's game of Life would also qualify as self-referential.

I don't see why Conway's game of life should not be considered self-referential though... I mean it's isn't it Turing complete? I don't see how any definition of self-referentiality should require throwing out systems which are minimally turing complete... If Turing complete is not enough, doesn't that imply that computable artificial intelligence is impossible in the first place?