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Borealid | on: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Most spreadsheet engines are turing complete, so you could use them to run an LLM.

I don't think many people would say an LLM written in Python is conscious BUT an LLM written in Excel is not.

People just don't ascribe consciousness to things that can't converse (or at least emote or give the appearance of emoting), and spreadsheets don't do that.

The reason people are debating the consciousness of LLMs is - obviously - that the LLMs generate sufficiently plausible text that people using them think they're having a two-part conversation. Like I think I might be having a two-part conversation now. Turning your question around, why do you think Hacker News posters are conscious? You have no direct evidence they are.

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TeMPOraL | parent | next
I think it's not really about having a conversation - I mean, that's part of it, but alone it's an illusion that eventually fades quickly. It's more of because of how it demonstrates intelligent behavior in reaction to requests, both in trivial and complex matter, and all across the board. LLM's response may be completely incorrect or confused, but it's nearly always exactly what you expect from a human[0]. This creates a more general feeling you're dealing with a human-like intelligence.

To be clear: I'm not talking about surface level things like prose. I'm saying that no matter what you do - whether you just paste a truncated log of a command into it with no further comment, or talk like a drunk teenager with no appreciation for grammar, or mix natural languages, or mix natural languages and JSON, or whatever else, the reaction you get is always that you would expect of a helpful person that got your message. It'll try - and usually succeed - to parse out what you actually meant, and deal well with subtleties around it.

This alone may not be enough to call it conscious or intelligent, but at the very least it's a large leap in that direction, and a qualitatively new functionality that classical software does not posses.

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[0] - This is by design, not accident. "Respond to arbitrary input in a way that makes sense to humans" is literally the overall goal function the LLMs are trained to.

gizajob | parent
It is difficult when humour and trolling are forbidden. It was easier to tell Slashdot posters were conscious. We could easily reach the stage soon where your agent is responding to my agent and we just leave them to it to run HN automatically.