Couldn't this be a flaw in the attention mechanism? Like they need some kind of grounding. An awareness of what they fundamentally should care about and how the thing they are currently giving attention to relates to that?
Words like attention, awareness and care do not apply to computers. At least, not yet. Intelligence and sentience are not applicable to servers. They are just machines with logic states. LLM's are just really cool math formulas with big-data fed into them. Big data is not intelligence. It is a massive data-set sorted, filtered down and interpreted by a language model.
LLMs are intelligent by any reasonable standard. Arguing otherwise is like arguing that chess algorithms aren't good at chess when they easily beat the best humans.
I disagree. LLM's are a language model math formulas that interpret and utilize big-data. Take away the math formulas and we are just back to a massive set of data. Adding to that I would suggest not even the purist forms of data meaning that the data-sets include knowledge from the open and anonymous internet and formulaic tuning from the AI owners and operators.
Your brain is mostly just a Principal Component Analysis calculator. Take away that "math formula" and you don't have intelligence either.
The LLM weights are not intelligent. But if you give an agent a mutable memory store and allow it to iterate, it is obviously intelligent. Not massively - it's constrained by the context window - but definitely somewhat.
The confusing thing is that their language ability far outpaces their true intelligence, and humans aren't used to that. Normally those things are highly correlated, so it tricks us.
If you want to talk about whether LLMs are intelligent, you have to define intelligence. "They're just math formulae" isn't a definition of intelligence.
A robot body, to really feel the world and get real feedback?
We are working on it. Also on automating the whole production pipeline. Right now a "evil" LLM could indeed not do much, but destroy. But once the whole industry is automate, things are different. I don't believe in AI becoming sentinent and taking over the world any time soon, but I do believe most don't see a danger when it would be inconvenient to see a danger. After all, lots of good and bad sci fi stories about exactly this went into their training.