Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
They can learn and change over time, that’s just not enabled. The services that offer them want a reliable, reproducible, controllable experience. There’s zero reason they can’t continue to change through usage, other than it’s a conscious decision not to enable that functionality.
That’s why they can only be conscious when they train using new data, and run asynchronously with continual input - the same way we do.
Edit: People downvote me, and I suspect it’s because they’re thinking of the public facing models. I am talking about progress behind closed doors. Even some of the public facing models are gaining the ability to learn, via a mechanism being called memories. It’s just a short text note that is passed into the context window of every prompt, but isn’t that exactly what our short term memory is? In my view is no different. Pruning the inclusion list to include only the relevant information is the equivalent to use forgetting some information, but if it’s kept in long term storage with reference links to other memories, it can be “remembered” and brought back into the current context. It’s functionally the same as our own learning and thinking.
Even if we could update an LLM’s weights continuously, the algorithm is still deterministic, like all computer algorithms. There is no evidence that humans are deterministic (or a “finite state machine”) in any way. So I don’t think such a dynamically-updating LLM could be conscious, either.
It is my personal belief that all life is deterministic. It’s the only plausible explanation for instinctual behavior - like monarch butterflies returning to their breeding grounds they’ve never been to. Or people yawning because others yawn. These aren’t conscious decisions, they’re peeks at the deterministic coding that life operates upon.
I don’t think you understand what “deterministic” means.
A computer algorithm can absolutely be non deterministic, pick your language and run random.rand()
There is a whole class of such algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_Turing_machine
But I don’t see how it makes a difference, even deterministic algorithms can produce infinite complexity, eg linear neural networks are proven to be able to compute any computable function, or the Mandelbrot set which is produced from a single recurrent statement but encodes a space of infinite complexity
Maybe your point is to say that a brain is performing a non computable function…but since your brain is computing that function…is that a counter example?
How are the numbers generated by random.rand() made?
Also, NTMs are not algorithms, they’re models of computation in theoretical computer science.
This is nonsense.
My point is that for brains, it’s not possible to recreate the exact same inputs to be able to test whether the brain produces the same output. So it’s literally not possible for brains to be deterministic.
And the earth couldn’t possibly revolve around the sun.
They have completely recovered the wiring of fruit fry brains and trained models on that architecture…is a fruit fly conscious? Is a little device with all th same movement and sense capability using the fruit fly con nectome conscious
I know, and it’s an example frequently cited in these types of conversations by people who don’t understand that research.
Quite likely yes.
It might be, I’m not sure. But because (quite similarly to humans) no one has a way to recreate the inputs from the outside world to pass to such a device, we don’t know.
Though to be fair, my original claim of “it’s not possible” to recreate inputs is probably too strong — it could be possible some day, but my best understanding is that we’d need something like a time machine that allows travel to the past, at least for repeatable tests. And as far as I’m aware, most physicists today are of the opinion that time travel to the past is not possible.