[DangitBobby]

Don't take this as a criticism, but I think overwhelmingly people took it the other way. The fact that the author admits at the end that the story was written with the assistance of "weights" is a tell, to me. I just have to assume the author's genuine position (which I believe to be, we don't know that LLMs aren't conscious or that they could never be conscious) is so absurd to you that the thing comes across as satire. I find myself in that same position sometimes.

[noduerme]

I appreciate you taking a moment to write this. I was a little confused by the downvote. I think I have a tendency to credit satire at times when it's not intended... my own sense of humor has a lot to do with tweaking people's expectations, and coming from a family of tricksters, no one wants to be the one who doesn't get the joke. So maybe it's a me problem. Having said that, the situation with the aliens is that they can't conceive of intelligent meat, because they can't conceive of how that could work. We do understand how matrix multiplication works and how it gives rise to apparently emergent behavior, because we theorized it and we engineered it. So I can't help taking the idea that we'd be baffled at "that's it, just numbers?" as anything but tongue in cheek.

I'd only add that if it's not intentional satire, it's an even more profound example of the unintentional variety.