it's an open question and lots of interesting work is happening at a frenetic pace here

• Language Models Can (kind of) Reason: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought https://openreview.net/forum?id=qFVVBzXxR2V
• Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682

A favourite discussed recently:

• Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

the stochastic parrot argument is a weak one; we are stochastic parrots

the phenomenon of "reasoning ability" may be an emergent one that arises out of the recursive identification of structural patterns in input data--which chatgpt is shown to do.

prove that "understanding" is not and cannot ever be reducible to "statistical modelling" and only then is your null position intellectually defensible

the point you're missing is we're seeing surprising emergent behaviour from LLMs

ToM is not sentience but it is a necessary condition of sentience

> it is also not clear whether what we measured here is theory of mind

crucially, since we can define ToM, definitionally this is infact what is being observed

none of the premises you've used are sufficiently strong to preclude LLMs attaining sentience

• it is not known if interaction with the real world is necessary for the development of sentience

• memory is important to sentience but LLMs do have a form of working memory as part of its attention architecture and inference process. is this sufficient though? no one knows

• sentience if it has it at all may be fleeting and strictly limited during inference stage of the LLM

mind you i agree it's exceedingly unlikely that current LLMs are sentient

but to arrive to "LLMs cannot ever achieve sentience" from these weak premises combined with our of lack of understanding of sentience, a confident conclusion like that is just unwarranted.

the intellectually defensible position is to say you don't know.

confidently wrong https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

A lot of free will proponents seem unable to distinguish between the concepts of a subjective experience of free will and the ontological existence of free will. They think subjective experience is sufficient to automatically prove the latter. They see them both as one concept. So strange.

It's like a mind block. Kind of shocking to see, really.

> A determined reality would dictate that we wouldn't bother pretending to have free will if we didn't have it.

False. You seem to be under the assumption a determined reality cannot give rise to the illusion of free will. This is an grounded, baseless assumption you're standing on.

We are experiencing "free will" but our subjective experience of such does not automatically impart to the universe that then free will as a concept is true. If you don't see this, simply come up with any other subjective experience as example and you should reach the same conclusion.

I subscribe to optimistic nihilism too.

> It doesn't have to be real to enjoy life, create meaning, experience things.

I'd just say here that those who say free ill is a lie, aren't saying to not enjoy life, create meaning, or experience things either.

The discourse around free will is orthogonal to all that. I tend to see a lot of people react defensively and unable to separate these concepts.

false dichotomy, but keep clinging to #1 if it helps you 🤷‍♀️

whisper is an open source model and there are fast C++ open source implementations that can perform live transcription on an RPI, what are you talking about lol

one naive explanation is that since chatgpt is at its core a text predictor, by prompting it in such a way that it minimizes leaps of logic (i.e., make each inference step build slowly so as to prevent it from jumping to conclusions), it will be more able to respond coherently and correctly.

right? it's likely their forced attempts to make the model respond in yes/no eliminates a sort of "show your work" behavior. likely they'd get better responses if they let it free-form

Uh, how about all those guides and blogs on any number of command line utilities?

The analogy of metaphysical vs epistemic certainty to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a woah dude moment. I'll be chewing on this for a while.

Thanks for your contributions to this thread, they were all so illuminating!