I think y’all are nitpicking this joke too hard

We know the math and the mechanisms of how LLMs work. The only thing we don’t understand is the significance and capabilities of the probabilistic associations it prescribes to symbol sequences.

While we don’t know how a human brain works in detail, we do know how a human brain tackles problem solving because we’re sentient beings and we can be introspective about how we think through a problem.

We can look at how vectors flow through a neutral network (remember, LLMs don’t even have a concept of words, it transforms tokens into vectors that it then builds mathematical associations between, it’s all numbers) and we can see through the data that there’s nothing resembling a world simulation in how it actually works.

Also keep in mind that the LLMs you interact with don’t even learn from your interactions. The data is all baked in at training time. If you turn the temperature of the LLM output generation to zero it will come up with the same probability answer every time. The more you learn about how they work under the hood, it becomes more and more clear that there is no there there when it comes to sentience.

I will say that I do think that the capabilities and significance of symbol association and pattern matching has been wildly under estimated. Word sequences need to follow a pattern to make sense, and if you stumble upon the right sequence of words, that sequence of words could be incredibly impactful and it doesn’t really matter how you come up with them. If you were to pull words out of a hat at random, there’s an infinity small possibility that you’ll get a sequence of words that happen to expose the secrets of the universe. LLMs improve on that immensely on that they use probability to reduce that sequence space to the set of word sequences that make sense, and in that reduced space are generative sequences that may produce real value, and we can improve on making that space more and more relevant and useful.

You think by processing the probabilistic association between word sequences? Humans think through world models, we have imagination, a physical and metaphysical simulation of the world around us. Absolutely none of that is involved in how LLMs work. There’s a lot to be said about the utility of association of knowledge embedded in symbols, and having a magic book that can retrieve pre existing information in context is incredibly useful and I think it will have an impact on the level of the printing press and the internet, but just because it’s incredibly useful at retrieving knowledge doesn’t mean it works anything like how a human brain works.

I view it by building up to the technology.

Is a book sentient? It is capable of providing recorded knowledge in the form of sequence of symbols on a specific subject at a level of proficiency far above the reader’s. But no, it’s static information that originated from a human.

Is a library sentient? It allows for systematic retrieval of knowledge on a vast amount of subjects far beyond what any human is capable of knowing. But no, it’s just a static categorization of documents curated by a human.

Is a search engine sentient? It allows for automatic retrieval of highly relevant knowledge based on a query from a human. But no, it’s just token based pattern matching to find similar documents.

So why is an LLM suddenly sentient? It’s able to produce highly relevant sequences of words based on recorded knowledge specifically tailored to the sequences of words around it, but it’s just a probability engine to find highly relevant token sequences that match the context around it.

The underlying mechanism simply has no concept of a world view or a mental model of the metaphysical world around. It’s basically a magic book that allows you to retrieve information from any document ever written in a way tailored to a document you wrote.