Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is

If you ascribe any level of sentience or intelligence to a computer, you definitely feel much less dumb than you actually are.

And who are you to assert that? How well defined is sentience already?

I mean, I’m all for local LLMs, but they are as sentient as a really good weather prediction model.

aka not at all.

Its just a fact of how they operate, mechanically. They are missing too many characteristics for it to even be an entertainable question.

They might operate differently but they still appear the same as us, 99.9% of the time. Imo if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck…

I mean… No? Absolutely not.

I dont even know where to begin. Maybe with their state being fixed in time; LLMs do not change. An sci fi analogy might be the “no timers” in orion’s arm, who are but a single thought frozen in an infinite loop in time:

www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47f4311eaef31

Except they arent even that, because its just a next word completion model, not something that thinks. It is not self aware.

arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09211

openreview.net/forum?id=klU4737opt

arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762

This becomes (to me) very obvious if you ever use an LLM in raw completion mode. It very smart, but at the end of the day its no different than a weather prediction model spitting out probabilities for a storm system.

Chat finetuning is meant to get humans to anthropomorphize them by training on human preferences, and the interface further reinforces this. Its all a trick, albeit a very elaborote one.

Will future architectures be closer to “thinking?”

Maybe.

But we are a long way away.

Are we not just prediction systems with more neurons?

Now im not saying LLMs are human at all because to be human is to have gone through our exact evolutionary path, but we really are in a lot of ways much more similar than you think. At least the speaking part of our brain is.

The argument that LLMs are fixed in time does not contradict consciousness. Say a human was stuck in a time loop and the human is asked the same question every single loop, at the exact same time, in the exact same way, with every single atom being in the exact place. Would their answer change? I would argue no, the same exact neurons would be stimulated every time that would cause the same exact answer every time.

We don’t even have a solid definition of what is concious. Are insects conscious? Like the fruit fly, we have modeled all of its neural paths and it simplifies down to essentially being a robot that responds to stimuli.

What does make humans special is our ability to learn. But what when an LLM trains its self? Is that not learning? I think the question of consciousness is too complex to simply say one way or the other and it is foolish to simply it this way.

But what when an LLM trains its self?

Thats what I’m saying. They cannot do this, not even close. Even a fruit fly is somewhat adaptive and can respond to novel stimuli, but an LLM effectively cant.

There are tiny experimental models closer to a fruit fly than large LLMs now.

…What about future world models with some adaptive learning loop, sampling stripped out, and so on?

Yeah! That would be fascinating. Then sentience starts to become more of a question.

But thats not what LLMs are.

People like Altman and Modi have grossly overexaggerated what current LLM architectures are capable of, they trained the LLMs to reinforce the illusion as much as they can, and they arent to inclined to change it. Hence all the good researchers have fled to research world models, and are saying transformers LLMs are not a viable path forward.

Even in your highly optimistic scenario, the AI wouldn’t even come close to being comparable to actual sentience.

Well, theres a lot of experimentation with actual neural nets mimicing biology (or literally using biological neurons), and I think that could start to raise the spectre.

World model research could be a significant component of that.

In principle, OP is right; humans are just machines. All I constest is that transformers LLMs are even in the same ballpark, or possibly a path there… they are not.