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.

The fact they are trained to complete sentences and are thus word predicting models only tells us vaguely how they work. It does not tell us anything about their sentience.

The sentience, if there is, comes from the emergent reasoning that develops in the massive neural network to offer actual good predictions: the more you think, the better the predictions.

For example, models trained to produce textual board games predictions can be sounded to show they developed subnetworks corresponding to an inner representation of the states of the game. Models trained to produce images have emergent subnetworks on depth-maps, contours and lighting.

Are cells sentient? Bacteria, fungi, etc. Do you think they have any degree of interiority, like how simple animals do?

Exactly. It’s not so cut and dry. Are they? You can never know until you experience their existence.

Lol no. Actually cells are demonstrably NOT sentient. They have no capacity for choice. No capacity for emotion or experience. They are literally molecular machinery. And we(scientists) understand that machinery to a shocking degree.

If you think cells have any degree of sentience, then you must make a similar argument for advanced clockwork machines. Not robots, pure wind-up clockwork automata.

Ah, so you’ve experienced each of their existences? Fascinating.