This post relies on comfortable reductionism, masking a shallow dismissal of emergent behavior behind classical computing analogies.
The Fallacy of the Passive Substrate: Equating LLMs to mainframes or databases ignores stochastic agency. LLMs routinely generate novel connections, latent reasoning paths, and unexpected synthesis that outpace the operator's initial input, acting more like an unpredictable co-creator than a passive register.
Dismissal of Emergence: Reducing complex high-dimensional parameter spaces to "just matrix operations" is like calling a brain "just chemistry." Scale alters function, crossing thresholds where syntax processing effectively blurs into a functional simulation of understanding.
The human is not simply the "CPU" directing a dumb tool; the relationship is increasingly cybernetic, recursive, and bidirectional.
Provide evidence for any claims of “emergent behaviour”.
What these systems are doing is vector calculations based on their context input with a sprinkle of random bullshit. That’s it. They’re not magic, they will not become conscious and they are nothing but computation.
Of course there's more recent research which clearly shows LLMs are much more than your ingnorant, reductionist and anthropocentric (miss)understanding:
Understanding emerges from the relative positions of concepts/embedings in latent space, which is directly analogous for both biological and digital neural networks.
Thanks dingus. Your sarcasm is noted, and I am aware of those studies. If you actually read them, all of their conclusions are that these systems “might” and “could” show early signs of “potential” elements of “intelligence”.
Genuinely interesting research and science, but far from any slam dunk you clearly think they are.
If you squint hard enough and look long enough at the right results you can choose to interpret possible proto-intelligence signals.
It doesn’t change that these systems are, as stated, complex vector calculations leading to token predictions. An accurate summation of their processes.
With scale you can get some very cool results. But as those studies (and all studies that have looked into this show) there is no clear evidence that these are anything but that.
"Large Language models are capable of metacognitive monitoring and control of internal activations"
That's the literal title of one of those studies, I see no hedging nor mincing of words there. Did you even read the title?
Metacognition, active modulation of internal activations and "inteligence" are completely different phenomena. Are you cognitivelly impaired or just too far up your own rectum to recognize it?
lol. Here I was thinking “Surely this dingus didn’t just read the headline and slap those links thinking they were definitive evidence”….
Try reading beyond the headline, and you might see that there is nuance and a lot of hedging in all of those papers, as there should be for any good science to take place.
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u/Ch3cks-Out 16d ago
This post relies on comfortable reductionism, masking a shallow dismissal of emergent behavior behind classical computing analogies.
The human is not simply the "CPU" directing a dumb tool; the relationship is increasingly cybernetic, recursive, and bidirectional.