alt Hacker NewsSure. A dog is a collection of cells and goo. Cells are self-propelling clockwork built from proteins and molecular machinery.
A cell by itself has agency and motivation, is capable of autonomous response to stimuli. It's alive and squirms when you poke it. A cell is capable of truly independent action. It can even feed itself and make its own energy to power the clockwork.
An LLM still is inert silicon until a human intentionally starts it and gives it a prompt. It's fundamentally incapable of action without instruction and incapable of existing without the entirety of the modern internet and electrical infrastructure, and the thousands of unseen human hands keeping the wheels spinning.
If you want to go deeper, you can make the same arguments about the proteins and molecular machines. Self-replicating molecules in an unbroken chain since the dawn of time. A protein at the base level is a machine capable of independent action. If it bumps into the right molecule, pure mechanics cause it to do something, change shape.
Ones and zeroes on a hard drive can't do any of that without human intent applied.
Oh sure, but you're comparing the wrong states.
If you rip the DNA out of a cell it isn't going to do much either; if only because most of the real mechanisms are RNA (and proteins), while DNA is 'just' the storage. Encapsulate the DNA back into a cell nucleus with the attendant mechanisms, and suddenly you've got something that runs again.
Meanwhile, if you encapsulate an LLM into what's called an 'agentic harness', it's also going to be running much more of the time (depending), specially if it has a what's called a heartbeat or goal loop driving it.
Still not a cell; most definitely not. But the behavior is a wee bit more interesting than some bits on an ssd.
Actually you probably already know this one: Regular daemons are also just bits on your drive, until they get ```systemctl start``` ed
(edit: I literally have a llama.cpp systemd unit running right now)