29 karma · joined August 29, 2025
This is really well said. I had not put my finger on it before. Maybe this is a next move in the saga to avoid labor unions in engineering.
It made Sutskever's enterprise a pretty grim cognate.
Personally, I have been unconvinced by any of these definitive yes or no answers to "are LLMs conscious?" - in both directions. The "they are not / can not be conscious" side relies too heavily on mechanistic reductionist arguments that can apply equally to neurochemical processes in the human brain - and yet, it seems that humans, with brains made of these neurochemical processes, are conscious. At the same time, the "they are definitely conscious" answers seem to generally rely too heavily on self-deception and lack of reality testing.
To be able to say something definitive here, it seems to me that one would need to say definitively what this experience is. I have not heard any of the loud voices in the arena - not Chiang, not Giulio Tonini, not Karl Friston, etc - do so. Therefore I find Anthropic's uncertainty, and careful, caring investigative process, well grounded given the evidence.
EDIT: ah, fun: they did include it in 15.0, but they decided to save the breaking change that removed backwards compatibility for 15.4. https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/479297
It's certainly the case that LLMs already are able to represent and make use of some kinds of apparently still tacit knowledge, and that the scope of that is apparently expanding. I don't question that. I question two things: whether it is always desirable for that scope to expand, and whether it is possible for that scope to ever fully cover what it seeks to cover.
Maybe this rephrase will help: the proposed solution is to render all knowledge explicit.
I remember way back in the day, there was some question as to the legality of compelled unlocking of devices; IIRC, it’s been deemed legal to compel a fingerprint, but illegal (under the first amendment?) to compel entry of a password—IIRC, as long as that password hasn’t been written down anywhere.
I gather this is written to that end primarily? Or is there some other goal as well?
Of course then you get into needing software to decode the more advanced encodings; maybe start with a voice transmission explaining in plain language how to decode the first layer, which gives you a program that can decode the second layer, or something.
Starting to sound like an interesting project.