alt Hacker NewsMachines could socialize back in a (more) meaningful way. But to do so, they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).
I have not totally abandoned the hope that a machine could be someone. LLMs aren't that, though.
[Edit to reply to Loquebantur, because I'm rate limited ATM:] You seem to have read this post as saying that I want that because I find human relationships inadequate. I never said that, nor meant it. My point was a more technical one: Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time. (It's kind of like "50 First Dates".)
I'm not pining for a social connection with a machine. But if a machine is ever truly capable of that, I hope I will interact with it as someone, not just as a machine.
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Losing context is only part of the issue. LLMs don't have the rich connection to the world that humans have. The only connection LLMs have with anything is streams of text. Not only don't they have eyes, ears, smell, taste, touch--they don't have bodies. They don't have to deal with the real, physical world and have it push back on them.
That is so utterly different from what we humans are used to that we can't even comprehend it, and we anthropomorphize LLMs because we can't make any sense of them otherwise. We can't comprehend that these things that emit text that looks like human text don't have all of the other things that lie underneath our words when we humans talk.
In some very very distant future we might someday have your typical sci-fi Data/R2-D2/Johnny 5/EDI style AI and yeah, at that point it'd be weird to not treat them as people, give them rights, etc. It'll take a lot more than solving the context problem to pull that off, and LLMs will never be that, but I agree whatever that technology ends up being it'd pretty much have to be able to hold onto memories. I doubt we'll ever see it in our lifetime, but who knows.
What an absurd premise. And not because it was "impossible": rather, why would you want that to begin with?
There are billions of real-life humans already there with you. Why do you need different ones exactly?
I presume, you don't like those already around. Fair point, they have many flaws for sure.
But that's the reason you interact with them in the first place? To learn and make not only other's flaws go away, but also your own?
Horrifying.
> they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).
I guess you can start to see that happen (for a while now) with e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, etc. keeping persistent memory of you, automatically.
Personally, I often find these memorization features annoying, because - more often than not - the persisted context is outdated because something in my real life changed that ChatGPT & co are not aware of.