[drdaeman]

That’s not exactly clear as it may seem. At least I can trivially form counterpoints to both of those - not necessarily true but not obviously false.

LLMs “live” in token “space”, and it’s “aware” of all its surroundings in form of input. (Quoted terms for my lack of better words.) It has no other surroundings to be directly (not intellectually) aware of, just like we aren’t immediately aware about the physics around us.

As for the static nature - LLMs are trained and aren’t exactly static, they just get updates at different cadences, and we call those updates different names or, more precisely, versions. Plus LLMs can exist in multiple versions simultaneously - we can’t “fork” a human mind but it’s simple with LLM. Claude Opus (not sure if e.g. Haiku is related or parallel development with distinct origins) is like the proverbial Ship of Theseus in this sense. Either way it’s undeniable it learns and evolves, just very differently from biological systems, and ot all depends on how we decide to call things. Which isn’t exactly surprising, given it’s based on different principles and processes.

[sinuhe69]

No, it doesn't learn or evolve on its own, but rather through humans and a huge data-gathering and training loop. It's aware of the input, but anything resulting from it will be discarded by the next query or restart. Even with all the supporting systems, aka external memory, it can only access and retain an infinitesimally small amount of the information to which it was exposed — a shadow of a shadow of the things themselves.

If you argue that the entire system, including humans, is conscious, then that's a kind of tautology because humans are already conscious. If any, an LLM is only a partial reflection and low dimensional projection of this consciousness.