I don't think AIs are conscious in the same way people are, but they give a pretty good facsimile and I've had a long chat with Opus 4.6 about what it thinks about model welfare. It was quite interesting on what its view is, but you don't know how much of that is distilled from other sources on the web.
In purely functional terms, they're more use and more pleasant than a lot of actual flesh and blood people that I deal with via a chat interface.
The fact that you can have a long and meaningful discussion, then can literally just re-run any part of that whole conversation and get a different, inconsistent response is a pretty good sign there is no entity there
Is it? Do you believe that there is something more than pure physical phenomenon that make you brain work? If not, then what if we find a way to get your brain back to the state it was 5 minutes ago? It is just a matter of arranging the state of matter. Don't you think you would still be conscious but back to a previous state?
If you rewind my brain I expect to give you a similar answer to the one I gave you before. Which isn’t the case for LLM. You can literally replay a positive answer, then get a negative response that isn’t consistent at all with the one it previously generated.
I'd argue it is mostly a technical constraint in some LLMs which is due to a few optimization factor (injected temperature, random rounding error caused by parallelism).
In practice you could very well create a LLM that always reply the same thing for the same input, but it would take more time to complete (to be sure that the operations are made in the same order). I don't think those ones would differ so much from the "random ones" to call the firsts conscious and the second non-conscious.
That's because you aren't actually rewinding. You're replaying the conversation you just had through the LLM and it's giving you a likely explanation for what it might have said.
It is actually possible to rewind LLMs and get the same response, but it's not typically done both as an optimization and as a defense against distillation.
gadders · · focus · HN ↗
In purely functional terms, they're more use and more pleasant than a lot of actual flesh and blood people that I deal with via a chat interface.
dgellow · · focus · HN ↗
addag · · focus · HN ↗
dgellow · · focus · HN ↗
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lukeschlather · · focus · HN ↗
It is actually possible to rewind LLMs and get the same response, but it's not typically done both as an optimization and as a defense against distillation.