But that's just because it's true.

I generally agree about the problem with anthropomorphizing. But I don't think Anthropic are doing that. They explicitly write "in biological entities this would be considered a sign of consciousness, but we don't know how to interpret it here".

However, I disagree with your point that "it's an autoregressive function, thus it doesn't matter". Let me explain why:

Assume I do a complete neurological scan of a brain. I then implement this scan in a simulation and run it. Assume that my scan and my simulation of the biology of the brain (and the sensory and motorical inputs and outputs) is good enough that you can now have conversations with the simulation, and in all aspects, this simulation behaves exactly like you expect a human to behave.

Of course this is deterministic. If you take the state of the brain and then run it again, replaying the inputs, you get the exactly same behavior again.

I would argue that the experiences of this simulation are of the same onthological status as our own.

Now I work in dynamical systems. The autoregressive process of LLMs (hooked up to a harness providing it with inputs and outputs) is roughly in the same complexity class I would expect for a brain simulation. A physical simulation of an ODE is also an autoregressive process. The major major difference here is the existence of a latent brain state. But conversely the autoregression on sequences of hundreds of thousands of tokens is a much higher dimensional state than I expect for the latent brain state. In my view this is more an artifact of our inefficient LLM architectures, than a fundamental difference.

Now to be absolutely clear: I don't see evidence that would clearly suggest that LLMs have experiences on the same onthological status as we do. I simply believe this is a reasonable and relevant question to ask.

> Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation.

This is an opinion that has no basis in any meaningful conceptual framework other than I am human and I want to feel special about it.

> It's not a living creature.

You mean, it is not biological life. And sure, that is the default meaning of life. We soon may have to extend it to digital life as well, or we will have to consider "conscious digital exitance" as a life analogue. At any rate, it has never been seriously argued that consciousness requires a biological substrate, see the thought experiments regarding computer simulations of the human brain. Would that not be a function as well, completely predictable because it is "just a program"? If not, then why not? And how does that differ from the predictability or reproducibility of LLM outputs?

My point is, all current proof points in a direction that strongly suggests that you need to reevaluate your first principles on this topic.

they want to keep the buzz while keeping things private to get huge premium during their IPO

I don’t know, a stab carries lots of bias in interpretation. We might be reflecting our conscious experience markers on a different conscious experience. And selectively so, e.g. lobsters welfare. From my perspective, this is the hypocrisy of these welfare statements. We are already happy to kill beings we consider conscious to feed ourselves but suddenly sensitive with a consciousness we don’t know if it’s there. I would wager this is more out of fear of the idea of this consciousness rather than out of welfare.

I like it, and it points in the right direction, but is not directly true: The markers are about interactions, how biological organisms behave in certain test situations.

But it speaks to the central question: Are the tests adequate? Or are they measuring some proxy of what we really care about, and LLMs are merely imitating consciousness.

It is easy to be sure because, despite their technically impressive outputs, the programming is child's play compared to biological programming. Recently it has become trendy to suggest that the human brain is "just electrical signals" and "just prediction". The first is perhaps true and I don't inherently rule out the idea of machine consciousness. The second would have gotten you laughed out of any serious discussion 5 years ago; diminishing the complexity of humanity's biological programming to such a ridiculously simplistic degree is a retroactive attempt to justify one's lack of understanding of how a mere prediction algorithm could output superficially human-like content.

Another way one could look at it is to consider what it would mean to have achieved programming consciousness. It would mean that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge. That we have become God. Is one so eager to believe that a simple token prediction algorithm is truly the key to life itself, that humanity has nothing left to discover and that all that's left to do is scale up and make it more efficient?

It is still trivial to engage the same obvious prediction failure modes in frontier models as it was years ago. They are not meaningfully improving on that front. Their technical outputs are obviously improving, mostly due to specialised reward-verified training, which we have already known can be used to create software that outperforms humans on specific tasks for decades (eg. Chess). Whether the software is useful is obviously independent of whether it has consciousness.

It looks like you refusing when you call it's point stupid enough and ask it to think more when it keeps reasserting a bad point.

A little bit like Neal Stephenson's metaphor of unix-like OSes as the "hole hawg" of operating systems. In the sense that there's very little preventing you from doing something like "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M" or running rm -rf on your homedir.

http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

If I recall right this was written around the same time as Cryptonomicon 25+ years ago.