Seriously the sheer amount of people that equate coherent speech with sentience is mind boggling.

All jokes aside, I have heard some decently educated technical people say “yeah, it’s really creepy that it put a random laugh in what it said” or “it broke the 4th wall when talking”… it’s fucking programmed to do that and you just walked right in to it.

And people are programmed to talk like that too. It’s just a matter of scale.

The difference is knowledge. You know what an apple is. A LLM does not. It has training data that has the word apple is associated with the words red, green, pie, and doctor.

The model then uses a random number generator to mix those words up a bit, and see if the result looks a bit like the training data, and if it does, the model spits out a sequence of words that may or may not be a sentence, depending on the size and quality of the training data.

At no point is any actual meaning associated with any of the words. The model is just trying to fit different shaped blocks through different shaped holes, and sometimes everything goes through the square hole, and you get hallucinations.

Our brains just get signals coming in from our nerves that we learn to associate with a concept of the apple. We have years of such training data, and we use more than words to tokenize thoughts, and we have much more sophisticated state / memory; but it’s essentially the same thing, just much much more complex. Our brains produce output that is consistent with its internal models and constantly use feedback to improve those models.

but it’s essentially the same thing, just much much more complex

If you say that all your statements and beliefs are a slurry of weighted averages depending on how often you’ve seen something without any thought or analysis involved, I will believe you 🤷‍♂️

There’s no reason to think that thought and analysis that you perceive isn’t based on such complex historical weighted averages in you brain. In fact, since we do know the basic fundamentals of how brains work, it would seem that’s exactly what’s happening.
What’s funny is people thinking their brain is anything magically different than an organic computer.