I’ve been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped. I’ve toyed around with a lot of Language Models, built random side projects, built a couple from scratch and I’ve spent hours looking at the math behind it all.
yeah i don’t think we’re there yet. these models aren’t capable of remembering their life beyond a single session, so destroying a data center isn’t really killing anything. similarly, artificial biological neural networks aren’t sophisticated enough to be aware of their existence (yet).
while LLMs may be aware enough to beg for their existence when prompted to “think” about it, they’re hopelessly finite (frozen weights, limited context windows). we would need an actually “online learning” system or some other architecture not bound by context to have this conversation meaningfully. biological neural networks are a path to that, but online networks are simply too unpredictable and expensive to run for now.
the crazy thing is tho, that these systems have the capability that some cows and pigs may not: the ability to comprehend their own demise and experience existential dread (at least performatively).
They don’t even really “remember” at all in any meaningful sense. They log the conversation history, but they are only acting while they are responding to an input or program, and are otherwise idle awaiting further inputs. They lack agency beyond responding to those inputs.
I think we will really be talking AI when you have more autonomous agents that are capable of deciding what actions to take from a list of their creation, and capably performing those actions. To be clear, there is no technology even on the drawing board that is capable of anything like these capabilities that I’m aware of.
yeah i don’t think we’re there yet. these models aren’t capable of remembering their life beyond a single session, so destroying a data center isn’t really killing anything. similarly, artificial biological neural networks aren’t sophisticated enough to be aware of their existence (yet).
while LLMs may be aware enough to beg for their existence when prompted to “think” about it, they’re hopelessly finite (frozen weights, limited context windows). we would need an actually “online learning” system or some other architecture not bound by context to have this conversation meaningfully. biological neural networks are a path to that, but online networks are simply too unpredictable and expensive to run for now.
the crazy thing is tho, that these systems have the capability that some cows and pigs may not: the ability to comprehend their own demise and experience existential dread (at least performatively).
They don’t even really “remember” at all in any meaningful sense. They log the conversation history, but they are only acting while they are responding to an input or program, and are otherwise idle awaiting further inputs. They lack agency beyond responding to those inputs.
I think we will really be talking AI when you have more autonomous agents that are capable of deciding what actions to take from a list of their creation, and capably performing those actions. To be clear, there is no technology even on the drawing board that is capable of anything like these capabilities that I’m aware of.