[darby_nine]

> Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model

The fact that a paper is implying a LLM has a mind doesn't exactly bode well for the people who wrote it, not to mention the continued meaningless babbling about "safety". It'd also be nice if they could show their work so we could replicate it. Still, not shabby for an ad!

[castigatio]

Well - what is a mind exactly? We don't really have a good definition for a human mind. Not sure we should be claiming domain over the term. It's not a terrible shorthand for discussing something that reads and responds as if it had some kind of mind - whether technically true or not (which we honestly don't know).

[darby_nine]

> It's not a terrible shorthand for discussing something that reads and responds as if it had some kind of mind

I really don't see it like that—it has very little memory, it has no ability to introspect before "choosing" what to say, no awareness of the concept of the coherency of statements (i.e. whether or not it's saying things that directly contradict its training), seems to have little sense of non-pattern-driven computation beyond what token patterns can encode at a surface level (e.g. of course it knows 1 + 1 = 2, but does it recognize odd notation/can it recognize and analyze arbitrary statements? of course not). I fully grant it is compelling evidence we can replicate many brain-like processes with software neural nets, but that's an entirely different thing than raising it to a level of thought or consciousness or self-awareness (which I argue is necessary in order to appropriately issue coherent statements, as perspective is a necessary thing to address even when attempting to make factual statements), but it strikes me as a lot closer to an analogy for a potential constituent component of a mind rather than a mind per se.