TL;DR: Conjecture I believe in

Sure. I think LLMs map to the associative horizon in humans. Usually very pronounced in young children and geniuses[1]. They can intuit details and structures (patterns) with minimal instruction, when given enough time (geniuses discover new details in old tomes, children learn how to function in the world, children can learn multiple languages at once just by hearing people talk, etc). Mentation of this sort is highly abstract and is great for solving novel problems, but doesn't translate well to functioning in a environment where the rules are almost always arbitrary and not easily discernable from dysfunctional behavior. A lot of these issues stem from a primarily "inward" approach to new information. LLMs, being just a probabilistic distribution of data, suffer from similar issues.

LLMs don't have any structure of their "own", little to no "guiding principle" (consciousness), instead, their "wiring" is based on the data they are fed. This data is already tuned to our human mode of thinking and our judgement. Even the hardware is made possible by our own biases ("ability"). So, tend to anthropomorphize it very easily. A LLM doesn't have an "inside" or an "outside", it's a large pattern from which parts are "picked" and "shown" to us. So this act of "picking" and "showing" would arguably be a better candidate for being "alive" than any large pattern it's used on. This act is not sophisticated enough; it makes "hallucination" possible, and also doesn't discriminate between the dataset and query, so that if the dataset has a "count to five" or "ask what my name is", the result will be influenced by it as if it was part of the query. Because of a lack of a structure from first principles, every result is a novel result.

Also, because a LLM is effectively queried as an egregore of whatever its trained on, there's only a technical difference between the different ways of changing the weights. I guess this is just a fancy definition of version increment.

We don't just process facts or pick and choose alternatives, our brain and the rest of the body work in tandem; the brain has many sources of real-time information - 5 senses, internal body "feel", "mystic" intuition, almost telepathic connection with close kin, etc. We have a certain degree of autonomy from what we consider the individual parts of our surrounding ecology, but we can't really leave it for long periods of time. The mind-body split is sidestepped by people that claim something digital can be "conscious". I think to really have a "conscious" machine, it needs to be built from first principles and not as a black box; and then, it would also need to co-exist with the environment, which would necessarily mean that it would only be able to exist in a closed, artificial environment. After all, the easiest way to make intelligent life is to have a biological child. I think people have really fuzzed the lines between digital tech / real life and because most of the digital economy exists as an analogue of the real (irl) economy.

I also don't think letting the LLM somehow change itself will work. Without human intervention on a large scale, it would be like coaxing a liquid to act as a solid without any change in its environment. And with human intervention, it'd just be regular research / tech work. I think, given any sort of "freedom", the LLM will gradually implode upon its own data. We can try to hypothesize about what constitutes true "randomness" for a LLM+"pick"/"show"system but in the end it's all in our own heads. It's not a structure that's so pervasive in our environment or so far past our scope that we'd discover something adjacent to it that could dwarf the current understanding and still stay in the same category.

I think genetic engineering is what will be really responsible for "Human-Designed Intelligence". LLMs and "AI" can be a great tool for uploading to actual biological brains. It's like transferring from a 1D system (LLM) to a 3D (or more) system (meat machine brain).

(puts on tinfoil hat) Some species of animals also exhibit very weird behaviors, like cheetahs, who are basically clones of each other. Or octopuses, which seem to have no reason to really exist. And honestly I have a pretty hard time believing that "Natural Selection" is responsible for all the diversity around us. I don't even believe that our sense organs could be a result of competitive speciation over a large period of time. (takes off hat)

Also, I personally believe that God created us, and because we're making something from non-biological material, it won't be conscious. Genetic Engineering would be like using nature's toolbox. Most people don't like this argument so I keep it as separate as I can.

FWIW, I'm not in the "it's not useful / a threat until it's AGI" camp. I think LLMs are an abstract data structure that can be queried with natural language, but curating its dataset is a very large part of the overall quality of the result, no matter what "prompt" you supply. Making data ingestable for LLMs will likely be what the majority of low-paid software development will ask for.

[1]: Introduction @ https://geniusfamine.blogspot.com/