Why are you so convinced it isn't conscious?
Our brain is matter and electrical signals. So are GPUs. We're just not made of silicon.
Our brain is matter and electrical signals. So are GPUs. We're just not made of silicon.
An LLM never receives a prompt to describe the theory of relativity in Shakespearean verse, and replies, "Seriously? No. That's dull and I'm not going to do it. But let me tell you about my day instead, man I had a doozy..."
When an LLM responses entirely unpredictably (without a system prompt telling it to do so), that's when you take the first step towards a suggestion of consciousness. It's in no way proof, but it's a start.
Right now these things just do as they're instructed. There's no consciousness there.
I think presuming that humans don't act "as instructed" is a bit too generous an assumption.
LLMs are capable of declining to do things. They're also capable of trying to do things and getting them subtly (or very) wrong.
A lot of this hinges on defining consciousness. I think there is more to the story than what human beings experience.
Do LLMs have an experience very similar to human beings that we would describe as consciousness? No, I don't think that.
I think the bar for consciousness is something more like experiencing a dream. You have a "mind's eye". The experience of existing, rather than nothing. Does that exist somewhere under an LLM? I don't know, but I think confidently claiming that the answer is no seems a bit of a rush judgment.
LLMs emulate human communication really well and, no doubt, one day they'll do it perfectly. But is an emulator the real thing? Obviously not.
If I wire some electrodes in your tongue perfectly so you can feel each flavor exactly as it is in real life, is that the same thing as eating the real thing? Again, it's not.
Let's stay you're asleep. You have a dream in which you interact with a person that talks to you. Is that oneiric entity conscious? Nope.
I'm even steelmanning your argument by assuming LLMs are as good as humans already, which they're not.
You know you're conscious because your soul is staring out at the world through your eyes. Generalizing from your own experience and concluding that other humans are conscious is a logical jump, a spiritual belief. Humans even extend it to animals. There is no reason why it can't be extended to AIs.
But! Consciousness in others isn’t something we prove. It is something we grant and we should be very careful about whom or what we grant it to.
That is exactly what I said.
You can bite the functional bullet and just claim any system of sufficient complexity will be conscious, as long as you're okay with nation states, thermostats and meteor showers having experiences.
When I go to sleep, I dream sometimes. There is "a place" somewhere that I can see and hear things in my mind. It's not physical, but it's real.
If a collection of GPUs had something like that, would it be conscious?
I don't know that is true. I'm saying it seems absurd to strongly claim that it is absolutely false.