[RaftPeople]

> but I find it almost as hard to see why evolution did.

Ignoring the concept of consciousness, it seems that self-awareness would be a strong attribute related to survival. It seems like it would help drive or amplify critical emotional states (e.g. my own survival, competition/success, love for self and relatives, etc.)

I can't see anywhere in the LLM machinery that would support the notion of self awareness in advance of the token selection process.

Possibly it could be argued that during token selection internal state is included and the result functionally looks like self awareness was included in the process, but that seems unconvincing.

[qnleigh]

Yeah self-awareness is a very different thing, and I agree it's easier to see how evolution would produce this. Many apparent signs of self-awareness in LLMs are probably baked into the models at end via post-training (RLHF), where they learn to behave as conversation agents and maintain a more consistent personality. The raw model probably shows no signs of self-awareness. In fact, I'm pretty sure that LLMs learn that they are LLMs only through post-training.