[beepbooptheory]

I guess I just don't have an intuition for why that is different from what it does for non-"spatial" things. Like the fact that it works is still because it produced the code it did token by token. Whether its dealing with, e.g., "beside the rock" or "in the array", it's doing the same kind of inferential activity.

[RugnirViking]

> I just don't have an intuition for why that is different from what it does for non-"spatial" things

A big reason people separate this out is because it was only a short time ago that AI models were noticably and uniquely bad at this. I don't say this to be like "oh so imagine where theyll be in x amount of time", rather that this thing that was once a serious limitation of the technology is slowly being compensated for by larger and better trained models

[fasterik]

>Whether its dealing with, e.g., "beside the rock" or "in the array", it's doing the same kind of inferential activity.

Are you sure about that? Presumably the spatial concept of "inside" and the computer memory concept of "inside" have different contextual embeddings in an LLM, not so different from how our brains have different neural activation patterns when we use different concepts. Unless you think that "the same kind of inferential activity" also applies to human neurons firing.

[emp17344]

You are correct. It’s important not to let hype peddlers imply AI possesses consciousness.