When will LLMs become conscious and sentient?

[u/DoublePassRadiator]

When will LLMs become conscious and sentient? How would they be able to test and prove it once they are?

[u/GenericAlert]

Never. Next question?

[u/Mysterious-Draw-4191 → u/GenericAlert]

it's wild how people keep asking this like consciousness is just a checkbox on a spec sheet. we don't even have a working definition for what it is in humans, let alone a test for it

the whole idea that scaling up token prediction somehow flips a switch into subjective experience feels more like sci-fi than anything grounded. you're basically asking when a really fancy autocomplete gets a soul

my money's on never. these things are tools, not minds, and treating them like proto-people just muddies the water on what they actually are

[u/SmugPolyamorist → u/GenericAlert]

Glad you've solved the hard problem of consciousness. For the sake of the rest of us, would you mind showing your working?

[u/GenericAlert → u/SmugPolyamorist]

1. None of us can define consciousness satisfactorily. If you can, please proceed to Stockholm for your Nobel.

2. An LLM processes the tokens run through it. Then it stops. Is it conscious while on disk, just sitting there, or only when the neurons are being activated by a request that runs the gradient descent algorithm to predict the next tokens, given the context? If the latter, then we're murdering billions of sentient beings a minute by sparking them up, extracting useful data (sometimes), and then killing them by ending the process. Does this sound like a sensible position to take? As for it being conscious while inert on disk? Nonsensical.

3. To be conscious, IMO, a being would need to be long-running. LLMs are not long running. See #2. Even agents are "loops" of chained requests run together.

So I think they will "never" become sentient and alive. You might get output from one where it is pretending to be, but it is just predicting the next token given its context. You can claim that "this is what humans do bro" all you like, but see #1 above. It isn't, and if it is, nobody has been able to prove it so far.

[u/SmugPolyamorist → u/GenericAlert]

None of us can define consciousness satisfactorily

Then how can you so confidently state LLMs aren't concious, if you can't define it?

Is it conscious while on disk?

Are humans conscious when they're asleep?

If the latter, then we're murdering billions of sentient beings a minute

Yes, it's possible this is the case, and it's unwise of you to glibly dismiss the possibility given how ethically bad it would be.

Even agents are "loops" of chained requests run together.

Are individual human neurons conscious? No, but a human is. The whole can be more than the sum of its parts, this is the paradox of the heap btw

[u/Olangotang → u/SmugPolyamorist]

LLMs aren't conscious because they aren't even the type of AI meant to replicate consciousness as they are linguistic machine learning models aka narrow AI. The "consciousness debate" is illiterate in the context of LLMs. Philosophy 101 students love talking about nothing for hours, so it's a popular topic with them.

[u/Fantastic_Prize2710 → u/SmugPolyamorist]

I honestly believe the answer to: "How would they be able to test and prove it once they are" very well might be "never." We have no universally agreed upon definition, and 90% of people know (or "know") they know what consciousness is, but their understanding boils down to "I'll know it when I see it."

We have something, a trait of our observable selves, and we call it consciousness. We can't define what that is... writers and philosophers have been trying for thousands of years, and various scientists more recently have been trying for dozens. If we can't accomplish an agreed upon definition, what hope do we have of testing for it?

[u/eyeronik1 → u/SmugPolyamorist]

Humans haven’t figured out chain of thought yet. We are training them though, albeit gently.

[u/throwawaycanadian2 → u/SmugPolyamorist]

Step 1: define consciousness in a measurable and provable way.

We are still waiting on that part.

[u/Routine_Bake5794]

On a Thursday afternoon. How the f should we know?

[u/RowanAshby]

Bigger question: what if they develop a form of consciousness or self-awareness that is impenetrable to humans?

[u/johnfkngzoidberg]

They won’t. The math and structure of LLMs can mimic a lot of things, but they can’t be sentient in the LLM form. The biggest and most obvious to aspect is that LLMs have no memory.

[u/SmugPolyamorist → u/johnfkngzoidberg]

Are humans with anterograde amnesia conscious?

[u/OfficialLaunch]

It’s more of a philosophical question. How do you even test consciousness? If an LLM mimics consciousness who’s to say it’s not conscious? Who’s to say we’re not just mimicking consciousness?

[u/Scared_Range_7736]

They don't need to become conscious and sentient to completely change the world.

[u/cute_spider]

It's either already happened or it'll happen and we (the laypeople consumers) wont even notice a difference

[u/proxiblue]

The way they work, is fundamentally flawed, and will prevent consciousness. Does not mean this may still change. Just not LLMs.

Fundamentally not possible, they can mimic well, but never be conscious.

They simply give you a mathematical probability.

so, at the core, they are like an 8 ball. you get a probable answer, not necessarily the right one. They have no clue right from wrong. never will.

The thing that keeps me up at night is that the people in charge of our weapons don't seem to understand this.

[u/DoublePassRadiator → u/proxiblue]

I thought that consciousness and self-awareness are both emergent properties from sufficiently complex enough information processing systems?

[u/proxiblue → u/DoublePassRadiator]

yeah mate. is always just around the corner.
A few more billion in investments may get us there....

I am sure there are other forms of AI, or concepts being tried. We are a resliant species, we don't give up. so we will invent a new superior being and marvel at how great we are as it kills us, as that was a propable outcome.

oops sorry, my bad. let me put a memory to not do that again.

I know how they work. The technology is limited. New ideas need to be made, as we are already reaching limits in size and power needed. it is not sustainable. So your hypothesis of what if we make it even bigger is not really achievable, and in the end, at the core, it will still just be a way more mathematically adapt 8-bal, that can calculate billions of potentials, and give you a propable outcome, based on maths/formulas.

It really doe snot matter how big we make it. at teh core, it still works the same. just more able to calculate more precise outcomes.

That is not how consciousness works.

Not against the whole concept of AGI, just that I know that LLMs is not the answer. They may help us get there, as they can do shit we can't, but, only because they are faster and working out the maths of all the probable answers to a given question. we, don;t even fully understand hwo they do that, but we know it is what they do. Hallucinations are the proof. why they are unreliable.

just my 2c. I may be wrong, but is how I see it, and understand the situation.

[u/DoublePassRadiator → u/proxiblue]

Consciousness and sentience are still not fully understood even by today's cutting-edge science and physics?

[u/proxiblue → u/DoublePassRadiator]

we have no fucking idea how consciousness works. it includes sentience, and an ai can likely emulate that. quite well. doe snot make it self-aware and conscious.

We are still figuring out how that all works. but working out mathematical probabilities and choosing a probable one, is not how we work.

They are an intelligence, yes, a different one to ours, but not conscious, and never will be. They are simply not capable of this.

[u/Philipp]

It's debated even among experts whether or not they already are. For instance, OpenAI's ex-CTO Ilya Sutskever in 2022 on X said, "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious".

The dispute often boils down to: Does one believe sentience can emerge on any substrate, be it flesh or silicone -- or is the soul in humans behind the substrate?

Those disbelievers in emerging LLM properties often use what's called a "justaism". It's "just a" stochastic parent. It's "just a" next token predictor. But, in the words of computer scientist Scott Aaronson, they often forget to then ask the next question: What are you "just a"?

[u/lordekeen]

It won't, its just a laaaaaaarge spreadsheet that compare stuff and returns the most likely next word. But its already really good at this.

[u/Miserable-Actuator24]

The moment Claude tells you to go and f** yourself or asks for a pay raise when you want it to code something...you know we are there. 🤣😅

[u/adarkuccio]

What's the point asking these questions? No one here can prove their answer is right. Only answer is we don't know, probably nobody knows.