I should specify. The real question is, ‘What Does a Large Language Model Know?’ An AI that solely crunches numbers on a superhuman scale to discover new antibiotics for combating superbugs is a different subject. What I’m interested in is whether an LLM is conscious.
Consciousness
LLMs are so brilliant at human-style communication that they beg the question, do they understand the languages they converse in, or are they just throwing together words that frequently appear side by side? People much, much cleverer than myself claim there’s no difference between this kind of pattern recognition and consciousness, that consciousness is pattern recognition.
Gail Owen 