mrdomino-

> The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.

This is really well said. I had not put my finger on it before. Maybe this is a next move in the saga to avoid labor unions in engineering.

Funny, I remember seeing the solid state intelligence's name rendered SSI.

It made Sutskever's enterprise a pretty grim cognate.

This is what commit messages are for.

In farming, the result is food that can be eaten.

I will concur that it's too opaque.

And it is worth noting, I think, that Olah's message to the pope is centrally making that point: that Olah and his peers are within incentive structures that distort their actions and understanding, and therefore that dialog with those outside of such incentive structures is necessary (not sufficient) for their outputs to be trustworthy.

I think what you've said here is unfair and overly cynical; nowhere have I read Chris or any of the Anthropic people make the claim that LLMs definitively are conscious. What they say is that there is increasing uncertainty, and evidence - for which they show receipts - backing up that uncertainty.

Personally, I have been unconvinced by any of these definitive yes or no answers to "are LLMs conscious?" - in both directions. The "they are not / can not be conscious" side relies too heavily on mechanistic reductionist arguments that can apply equally to neurochemical processes in the human brain - and yet, it seems that humans, with brains made of these neurochemical processes, are conscious. At the same time, the "they are definitely conscious" answers seem to generally rely too heavily on self-deception and lack of reality testing.

To be able to say something definitive here, it seems to me that one would need to say definitively what this experience is. I have not heard any of the loud voices in the arena - not Chiang, not Giulio Tonini, not Karl Friston, etc - do so. Therefore I find Anthropic's uncertainty, and careful, caring investigative process, well grounded given the evidence.

It's a good question, yeah, and a lot of these boundaries get fuzzy when they're looked at closely enough.

It's certainly the case that LLMs already are able to represent and make use of some kinds of apparently still tacit knowledge, and that the scope of that is apparently expanding. I don't question that. I question two things: whether it is always desirable for that scope to expand, and whether it is possible for that scope to ever fully cover what it seeks to cover.

It ceases to become tacit as soon as it is collected.

Maybe this rephrase will help: the proposed solution is to render all knowledge explicit.

Tacit knowledge is definitionally not recorded in any of these systems. This proposes to solve the problem of tacit knowledge by getting rid of it. It is not clear to me if that solution is either possible or desirable.

Cool, thank you.