A lot of words in this post and yet the author doesn’t ever define the word “consciousness”. The closest they get is mentioning their past work on information systems.
Folks, how can we debate whether LLMs are conscious if no two people can agree on what the word even means?
Because so many #keep4o supporters on X and r/MyBoyfriendIsAI have AI girlfriends and are super invested in AI being conscious because they can NOT cut it in the real world.
I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.
At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.
> For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.
The crux is here somewhere.
A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's lifetime, because that serves everyone.
Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding. They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes.
The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own personal hell.
As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder what their response will be.
As usual, there’s no factual basis for the claims other than “I made it up” and author doesn’t seem to have technical experience with ML experience. A lot of weasel words doing all the heavy lifting here.
Well, since all LLM companies are very secretive about their finances, the only public information from them about their revenues or profits or liabilities are as the top commenter said are without any "factual basis for the claims other than “I made it up”" and their CEOs are seemingly not very well versed in ML judging by their public statements and usually use a lot of weasel words themselves. So my comment was a joke, that it is rather hard to distinguish who is making stuff up - LLM corporations defenders or critics :) .
And yet the crazy thing is that this stuff is par for the course human-wise and yet HN continues to rise up with pitchforks in hand complaining that ai is going to replace whatever this is. Like we're losing something.
Because by definition, sapience is something only humans have. Ergo, parrots are not sapient.
More meta, all of the threads on this page are just people playing games with definitions. Eg, “qualia is something I have as a human but machines don’t have it. Therefore, LLMs do not have qualia.”
You're confused about the etymology. Homo Sapiens was coined in the 1800s. People have been saying "sapient" since the 1300s, and it is rooted from the Latin word "sapientem" which simply means "sensible; shrewd, knowing, discrete". Homo Sapiens just means "wise human", and we humbly bestowed the name upon ourselves.
> More meta, all of the threads on this page are just people playing games with definitions. Eg, “qualia is something I have as a human but machines don’t have it. Therefore, LLMs do not have qualia.”
True. For me, the actual interesting debate is not if LLMs are intelligent or not (easy to dismiss) but to what extent LLMs embed into our socio-techno-economic reality.
The set of tokens is learned, more or less. So I don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. There’s not a human manually deciding what tokens make up the token dictionary.
Photographers have already delegated their art to pushing buttons on a machine. They are the most receptive to AI tools, but not representative of artists in general.
> I supported Polymarket for years because I believed they represented crypto values.
>
> In fact, their platform is simply another bucketshop where if you bet too much, you're going to get cleaned.
Please, tell me more about these “crypto values”. Are they values like, “no regulations,” “rug pulls,” “funding ransomware”?
Huh. Crypto values always have been that code is law. In the case of this prediction market, the resolution is not strictly controlled by code. It is not a decentralized system and it does not espouse crypto values.
Folks, how can we debate whether LLMs are conscious if no two people can agree on what the word even means?
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