[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.