Hinton (Nobel Prize winner, “Godfather of AI”, key contributor to training functions) recently gave a talk at the UK Royal Institute.
Possibly the most controversial and interesting assertion he makes is that, by his analysis, current multimodel LLMs do in fact have subjective experience – and this may be a separable idea from the idea of “consciousness”, ie, LLMs have a subjective experience, but not consciousness.
(hopefully the link goes to 36:33, where he talks about this)
- God made us special.
- Nope, evolution.
- But we’re still better than animals! We can cooperate.
- Have you seen wolves?
- Well… we have emotions. Something no animal can ever have.
- Elephants mourn their dead.
- But, but, … we have a sense of “self”.
- Even crows recognize themselves in a mirror.
- Tools! What about tools! We are separated by them by our ingenuity.
- Boy do I have news for you.I have a feeling that such a conversation could be had about LLMs either now or in the near-ish future.
- Mathematics! Only we can do mathematics!
- Sorry, sir, even fish can do mathematics
