Mainstream News Anchors Now Talking About the AI Bubble Bursting at Any Moment: "I think the entire AI boom is investing in the wrong future."

There is this insane amount of investment in AI built around LLMs that threatens the entire world. People worry about the bubble bursting but think AI is the ant’s pants without considering that the LLM is a dead end. None of the AI companies are going to achieve Artificial Intelligence. That’s why they will actually implode, their systems aren’t intelligent.

It wont be a real AI, but itll be just enough to kill off a lot of the software industry.

I’m genuinely curious what “real AI” is to you?

Real ai to me would mean true agency. And an entity which has its own goals and relationship to its world.

Yeah. I wonder if it might be difficult to identify something that reaches that point? I suppose genuine creativity might be an indication of intelligence? Or a desire to reprogram itself? I dunno, I’ve recently read Peter Watts blindsight and it kind of made me reconsider the relationship between consciousness and intelligence.

If someone truly believes LLMs are sentient, then they must under no circumstances prompt them even once; that would be murder.

Please explain without sounding crazy.

An LLM is a stateless stochastic function ran over your prompt (plus whatever system prompt) as input.

If you genuinely believe that the LLM is conscious, that means every time the function stops running (i.e. stops producing output tokens), the consciousness ends.

This is far closer to death than to, say, sleep, because prompting again doesn’t “wake” the LLM, it just runs the function again, from the top; as if a digital twin was given a transcript of the previous conversation and asked to take it from here.

(Obviously, “murder” was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and this doesn’t even remotely meet any legal definition of murder. I was mostly poking fun at people who think LLMs are alive, without thinking through the implications. Personally, I think the idea that LLMs are alive/conscious/sentient is very often linked to not understanding that LLMs are not, in fact, a constantly-running ghost in the shell, thinking about and remembering things in the background.)