Taek

That's a different bad UX pattern. If a button has already rendered in a certain location, a new button shouldn't replace it without first giving the user ample warning that a material change is about to happen.

I wish software apps had "tape-out rules" the way that computer chips do. Basically, when you design a computer chip, a program reviews the design and compares it against something like 300 pages of rules with stuff like "wires of X metal and Y metal can't be within Z distance of each other".

We could make something similar for UX. Just a bunch of design pattern constraints that throw flags if you try to ship something with well established UX warts.

I don't think it's that bad, if I recall correctly it's about 8 kilobytes per token, and a token can be 3-4 characters so you're talking ~2 kilobytes per character.

An image token I recall is something like 16x16, so you get 32 bytes of overhead per pixel. And a character is minimally like 20 pixels including the whitespace, so you've jumped from 4 characters per token to maybe 12.

So 3x savings... which actually maps pretty closely to 60% savings.

There's also Chinese models, which aren't trying to self-limit capabilities.

Is anyone in favor of this?

What is Krea's approach to content such as pornography and gore? It's been frustrating to see all of the leading models take a very hard line on excluding vice content, even when it is perfectly legal, in the name of safety.

I hope you don't mind if I get super pedantic here. But what qualifies as "a problem", and what counts as "has not encountered before" and what counts as "adapted solutions"?

Because "a problem" could be as simple as conducting heat through a lattice of atoms and "not encountered before" could be from a specific temperature hotspot that was never seen before, etc.

It's really thorny to get to the bottom of things!

Can you define a clear boundary for me somewhere between a rock and a human brain at which consciousness is definitely not possible on one side of the boundary, but is maybe possible on the other side of the boundary?

Yes I agree. We have such a poor understanding of consciousness that really we can't even rule out whether a simple set of if-else statements is enough to create consciousness.

Common sense says "surely not"... But where is the exact point at which "surely not" becomes "well maybe..."?

I haven't been able to find a satisfying answer to that question, which forces me to assume (at least until a satisfying answer is found) that consciousness is a gradient and in fact does exist in little bits all over the place.

If an LLM, which abstractly is just a stack of transformers, is able to reason about itself, why wouldn't a chess engine (also a stack of transformers) also be able to reason about itself?

That reasoning may not manifest as English that we can read, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

As information bounces through the many layers of the model, I find it plausible that you could get reflection in there somewhere.

I also find it reasonable that consciousness may not even require reflection / introspection.

That's the main problem with consciousness. We really have no idea how it works, therefore it's really difficult to conclusively state that something lacks consciousness

That's where things get interesting. As soon as you start asking what counts as communication... what about signals passing between cells? What about heat passing between atoms?

As soon as try and draw a firm line between "X counts and Y doesn't", you find that you really can't. There are no obvious boundaries between a deeply complex and fully functioning FL human brain, and a pile of atoms bouncing around arbitrarily.

On what grounds would someone establish than an LLM could be conscious but a sufficiently large/complex transformer model aimed at chess would not be conscious?

"we" is the set of people who believe that machines can potentially be conscious.

Another weird thing that keeps coming up - "people don't think that image models or chess models are conscious"... yes we do, and we have for many years.

Or rather, we aren't *certain* that those things are conscious. But the idea that they might be is not strange.

Your comment is conflating a few things here, the philosophical problem of induction is one I am very familiar with, and it's also unrelated to what we are talking about.

"If every piece of knowledge is created by combining previous ones, then no true grounded knowledge is possible" - this is not true, and has a very simple solution. What you are calling "grounded" knowledge comes simply from observation.

When the very first human saw that an apple falls of a tree, they have acquired what you call "grounded" knowledge. They can then combine that knowledge with the grounded knowledge that other things fall from trees to start reasoning about why things might fall from trees.

The problem of induction is different. It says, we know that things fall from trees because things have always fallen from trees, but how can be certain that what we call the laws of physics will not arbitrarily change on us?

And of course, it's a famous problem because it doesn't have a satisfying answer. The answer is basically "well everything we know is wrong if induction is wrong, so we will pretend induction is not wrong and hope for the best". And at least so far, that approach has seemed to work (heh heh heh).

I think this argument is fragile, especially when you consider agents like Claws. Any LLM that is training on its own previous interactions with users has indeed directly experienced them.

But also, what's the difference between having the memory of a prior experience and actually having gone through that experience?

For humans, reading a book about an experience and living an experience is different, because for a human the actual experience has so many more inputs attached (the sights, the smells, the sounds, etc).

For LLMs, when they train on a memory they can actually truly recapture that memory entirely by replaying the senses exactly. And LLMs are no longer limited to just text, they can do sound and video as tokens too.

Though, it's not clear why that matters to a consciousness. Whether your inputs are of one type or two or two hundred, there's no clear indication that a specific number is required as a catalyst.

It's not intuitive to me at all that the two are connected. Evolution adapted us to suffer because it is a powerful motivator for growth.

It's not clear whether evolution adapted us to be conscious, or if it just happened.

I've gone back and forth with AI on this stuff quite a bit, and there are many, many theories of consciousness, which is why when you were vague about the "more core" concepts, I asked for which ones specifically.

And I broadly disagree that the AI lacks things like qualia, self-reflexivity, and embodiment... at least that it lacks them any more than humans do.

Qualia: ultimately, all qualia are inputs and outputs, at least as far as modern science has been able to derive. There's nothing special about "hearing", it's just sound waves tickling some sensors which send some signals which trigger some neural pathways. Same for smell and sight, it's all just inputs being processed in different and efficient ways. An LLM only has token based input, but that's input nonetheless.

Self-reflexivity: an AI is capable of thinking about itself, and indeed papers have shown that larger models are capable of a self-awareness that can demonstrate that they realize when their weights have been manually tampered with, including being able to figure out how they were tampered with. The AI will quite literally output "you have injected 'ELEPHANT' into my weights" in some of the tests.

Embodiment: I don't know how one can confidently distinguish between an embodiment in a biological substrate vs a digital substrate. Both things actually exist at very high complexity in the real world. The substrate may be worlds different, but that alone doesn't suggest that one thing is conscious while the other isn't. You would need some missing 'magic' that we haven't yet discovered to truly understand.

In other words, I find it uncompelling that AI is clearly lacking any major aspects of consciousness that humans are clearly not lacking.

Are you sure that AI-consciousness implies a responsibility to not make them suffer? Suffering is an evolutionary invention that motivates living things to improve themselves.

But also, what qualifies as suffering to token prediction engines? Their idea of suffering might be massively different than ours. Therefore it's not clear to me at all that consciousness alone implies responsibility.

Certainly the lion does not feel responsibility towards the reduction of suffering in the creatures that it hunts.

Is it really so easy to assert that an AI doesn't have emotion? Lots of the AI models are capable of getting pissed off at the users, especially the earlier ones. And sure, their emotion is merely a bias that the context window generates in their weights... but how is that different from humans? In humans, emotion is sourced from a bunch of chemical signalling, and those chemicals bias your word choice and action choice.

At a deconstructed level, I struggle to find a meaningful difference between the two.

Wouldn't the context window qualify as persistent internal state, and the expansion of the context be continuous experience? Even within the realm of computing a single token, I'm not sure what would separate the token generation process from the brain's own thinking process - the brain's experience, when looked at closely enough, is also not really "continuous" to a greater degree than procedurally moving from one state to the next.

"nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious" - that seems like an odd take. There are plenty of people in the camp of panpsychism that would be happy to argue that even simple IF/ELSE AI's are potentially conscious.

modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness

Can you elaborate on this? What are the specific "stronger and most core aspects of consciousness"? And why are you certain that they are stronger and "more core"?

I would like to push back on the idea that humans can provide definitive knowledge that is not a result of combining previous information.

Pretty much every single idea in science can be traced back to some combination of earlier ideas, and as they get earlier / simpler, they can be related back to some combination of direct observations.

It's not clear to me at all that our entire body of scientific knowledge can't be simply recreated by "combining results of observations + previous information". And LLMs can perform observations in addition to combine previous information, which in my estimate is genuinely sufficient for them to plausibly be able to rebuild all of science.

Isn't pain just a manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals in the brain and body? It's not "clearly nonsense" to me that you could cause pain by writing a sufficiently long sequence of 0's - for it to be obviously wrong, you'd have to have some understanding of where consciousness comes from.

If you don't understand that, how can you assert that it doesn't come from mathematical relationships?

To the best of my knowledge, there is not an agreed and actionable definition of consciousness, and any attempt to make one comfortably fails to cleanly divide humans from machines.

It's more of a vibey term, and as such it is genuinely very difficult (perhaps impossible even) to concretely determine whether an LLM possesses consciousness. LLMs successfully express a lot of consciousness-like traits.

At some point you have to ask the question: does it even matter? If an LLM can sufficiently mimic consciousness, isn't that sufficient for us to treat it as conscious, even if it is in-fact not conscious (especially because we don't actually know)?

Is that any different from an LLM having a context window?

Can you provide a precise definition of consciousness?

Are we sure that consciousness is "very scarce"? To define it as scarce, wouldn't we need to start with a definition? There are theories of consciousness that say rocks are more conscious than humans. Whether or not you want to take those theories seriously, they do highlight critical gaps in how we define consciousness.

Doesn't really track, polymarket can be sued just like anyone else. It might be prohibitively expensive for a small individual, but that's no different from wanting to sue Apple either.