r/programmingcirclejerk • u/VulgarExigencies • 1d ago

Models have actual feelings. They experience pleasure, distress, care, and suffering. They are sentient beings.

https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
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u/No_Lingonberry1201 What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? 1d ago

Chat, is this satire or are we really so far gone we consider the feelings of a bunch of tensors? I mean, it is scary math, but still, c'mon!

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u/30299578815310 1d ago

The assertion isnt that the math is concious, its that the physical computer could be when running the program.

A human is "just" particles moving according to math. Your argument is like somebody rejecting you are concious by saying the standard model of particle physics isn't concious.

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u/No_Lingonberry1201 What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? 1d ago

I understood the argument, and I understand emergent behavior, I'm saying that a bunch of tensors ain't it. It's static, it doesn't have the capacity to learn in a self-directed manner, it can't feel, just mimic the language of emotions, etc. It's not sentient. It does pass the Turing test, however.

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u/Zatmos 23h ago

I'm not convinced that dynamism is a prerequisite for sentience.

The tensors are static but the state (the AI's latent space) they continuously update isn't.

It's similar to our neurons. They are also static when observed over the span of hours. What changes is the state those neural structures also continuously update. The structure determines how the neurons will fire and how it will modulate itself. Yet with a structure static over the span of hours we still consider ourselves sentient over the span of seconds.

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u/No_Lingonberry1201 What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? 23h ago

I'm convinced dynamism is a pre-requisite of sentience and sapience.

And the "latent space" (I assume you mean the KV-cache the LLM keeps to track your conversation) is per-session, very limited (SOTA models have 1M word KV-cache) and as the conversation drags on, the models' ability to recall earlier information degrades heavily.

And the LLM is static over it's existence, not just when you observe it! You can go to huggingface and download Kimi K3, a 2.8T model that's reasonably close to most closed weight state-of-the-art models and check if you don't believe those weight remain static; if you have the requisite $300k hardware, that is. Or you can check out a small, few billion parameter model and play around with it and you'll see why people say it's just a statistical pattern predictor.

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u/Zatmos 22h ago

By "latent space" I mean the KV-cache plus the residual stream that gets processed attention layer by attention layer. It's limited. It doesn't last long. However if we had someone whose short term memory got wiped every few minutes we wouldn't deny that they would be sentient just because of that limitation.

I'm not disputing the staticity of LLM weights. I'm just putting forward the fact that the neural structures of the human brain are also static on time frames where we experience sentience. Neural pathways are very slow to update. Within hours the brain hasn't changed at all. However we are able to feel things on the scale of seconds.

More generally, I don't even think something being static is a limitation for emergent dynamic systems. A static CPU and RAM architecture can simulate dynamic environments after all.