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MyOutfitIsVaguetoday at 4:35 AM1 replyview on HN

These discussions often end up resembling religious arguments. "We don't know how any of this works, but we can fathom an intelligent god doing it, therefore an intelligent god did it."

"We don't really know how human consciousness works, but the LLM resembles things we associate with thought, therefore it is thought."

I think most people would agree that the functioning of an LLM resembles human thought, but I think most people, even the ones who think that LLMs can think, would agree that LLMs don't think in the exact same way that a human brain does. At best, you can argue that whatever they are doing could be classified as "thought" because we barely have a good definition for the word in the first place.


Replies

estearumtoday at 1:17 PM

I don't think I've heard anyone (beyond the most inane Twitterati) confidently state "therefore it is thought."

I hear a lot of people saying "it's certainly not and cannot be thought" and then "it's not exactly clear how to delineate these things or how to detect any delineations we might want."