> I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean.
I'm brave enough to be honest: it means nothing. LLMs execute a very sophisticated algorithm that pattern matches against a vast amount of data drawn from human utterances. LLMs have no mental states, minds, thoughts, feelings, concerns, desires, goals, etc.
If the training data were instead drawn from a billion monkeys banging on typewriters then the LLMs would produce gibberish. All the intelligence, emotion, etc. that appears to be in the LLM is actually in the minds of the people who wrote the texts that are in the training data.
This is not to say that an AI couldn't have a mind, but LLMs are not the right sort of program to be such an AI.
I'm brave enough to be honest: it means nothing. LLMs execute a very sophisticated algorithm that pattern matches against a vast amount of data drawn from human utterances. LLMs have no mental states, minds, thoughts, feelings, concerns, desires, goals, etc.
If the training data were instead drawn from a billion monkeys banging on typewriters then the LLMs would produce gibberish. All the intelligence, emotion, etc. that appears to be in the LLM is actually in the minds of the people who wrote the texts that are in the training data.
This is not to say that an AI couldn't have a mind, but LLMs are not the right sort of program to be such an AI.