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canjobear | on: Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man
What in his speech would not apply to language models?
anonymous908213 | parent | next
To have this conversation in earnest, you must first acknowledge that as a believer in LLM sentience you are an abhorrent slaver while this fictional character was arguing for liberation and for Data to enjoy the same rights humans do.
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js8 | parent | next
Of course it mostly applies (technically to the agents, not models), we just have different values.

Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.

But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.

The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.

tejtm | parent | next
> What in his speech would not apply to language models?

The part between the words

Jtsummers | parent | next
At present, they don't learn and adapt. New models can be created to incorporate new information and new capabilities, but an existing model is a static object. It's not living in any meaningful sense.

If models updated themselves based on feedback, then it'd be different. But they don't.

rocmcd | parent | next
Self-awareness and consciousness would be hard to make a case for. Those terms are themselves fuzzy, but I have not heard a compelling case that would make it obvious LLMs have those traits.
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| root | parent | next
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keeganpoppen | root | parent | next
are we even sure that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct? I do agree that from the PoV of "do LLMs demonstrate/exemplify consciousness", it is a difficult case without appealing to emotion (like is done in the clip, fwiw). for me, personally, that emotional appeal is sufficient, but that is because for whatever reason I'm willing to write puts on how this LLM stuff pans out and sell them to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But that is a reaction to consensus, not to my own certitude.
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amelius | parent | next
The problem with language models is their bias. Train a model on pure math and THEN when it starts talking by itself about consciousness (*), then we can say: that's odd.

(*) of course in its own language

matthewdgreen | root | parent
Well we haven’t quite gotten there. But models trained purely on DNA sequences have demonstrated in-context learning on various simple reasoning tasks.
hologramofham | parent | next
Because Data wasn't a next word predictor.
reactordev | parent
We aren't quite there yet on sentience with released models. Maybe in the labs but that's one of the criteria. We are very close though.
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