I’m trying my best, but I think mathematicians have been awakened to the future better than me. For now, I still can’t help that my gut maintains the false hope that my, uh, “technical entrepreneurship” skills or something, will have meaningful leverage for an appreciable while.

No. A concatenation of many matrix multiplications is… just a single matrix multiplication (that’s what linearity means). Rather, a neural network is a concatenation of matrix multiplications *and* nonlinearities, i.e. a concatenation of arbitrary linear and nonlinear operations, i.e. an arbitrary operation. So the relevant question is rather: can consciousness be instantiated by an arbitrary abstract operation? I’d say it’s pretty clear which way round the burden of proof goes.

Trying to locate the spark.

Yes. Healing, growth, and sensitive capacities (ability to feel pressure and pain, for instance). I realize these have mechanistic manifestations but they can’t be reduced to mechanism. Biology is a distinct science, it is not merely applied physics.

FT exclusive: OpenAI’s models took data from 55 websites belonging to businesses, non-profits and government agencies including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the International Energy Agency ft.trib.al/AC1uyE5

Happy to share our paper, "Correct Answers, Invalid Traces: What Verifiable Grade-School Math Reveals About Chain-of-Thought Traces". When a model gets the right answer, is the reasoning it produces also right? We test this on synthetic grade-school math where every step of a trace can be checked by a program. Thread below.

In time, people will recognize that mathematics is a subfield of AI.

ok i think i finally figured out why alignment has gone basically nowhere after 15 years and several billion dollars. the problem is hard sure. but have you met the people in charge of it 1) the leadership does not know how computers work. ask one what happens when you type a url into a browser and watch them start sweating. dns is a spooky word. they genuinely believe the model lives in "the cloud" like a ghost haunting a castle 2) zero idea how large scale distributed systems work. never been paged at 3am. never watched one bad bgp announcement take half the internet offline. their big threat model is the ai "copying itself across the internet" like its a floppy disk virus from 1998. brother it needs 50 megawatts, a liquid cooling loop and a personal relationship with jensen. it is not escaping onto your smart fridge 3) they dont understand the stack they are supposedly protecting us from. ask about inference servers, kv cache, batching, egress, rate limits. blank stare. ask how the model will seize the power grid and you get a 45 minute answer with a hand drawn diagram and three links to their own blog 4) nobody can define an agent. ask ten of them and you get eleven definitions and a 30 page google doc. to the rest of us an agent is a while loop that calls tools and eats a 429 every thirty seconds. to them its a digital god in its larval stage. my agent cant book a dentist appointment without asking me three times if im sure 5) they started from "everyone dies" and worked backwards so every result is bad news somehow. model refuses, deceptive. model complies, sycophantic. model does well on evals, well now its scheming about the evals. i cant think of a single thing a model could do that would get them to say ok maybe we're fine

there's no "reasoning" models. You can call something you invent (like a new approach to using AI) anything you want. Just bc you choose to label an approach "reasoning" doesn't mean it's reasoning. It's not reasoning. AI will never be intelligent it's hype

Anyone who still describes LLMs as "stochastic parrots" in an attempt to distinguish them from "thinking humans" deserves ridiculing twice over.

it doesn’t now, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility it could one day. our own brains are quite literally neural networks after all

failing to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence is a pretty serious error of understanding that will lead you to make bad predictions and be consistently surprised by their behavior. not using terms like "thinking", "understanding", or "feeling" to describe them is a common tell that the speaker lacks deep technical knowledge of or hands on experience with modern models. if you have a friend who you notice not using this kind of language you may want to check in on them, they could have fallen into "tool-psychosis", a form of delusion where otherwise well educated people start to conceptualize sophisticated digital minds as analogous to simple computer software and find it very difficult to regain contact with reality

Incidentally, the claim that AI “thinks” is not really a technical claim about LLMs, but a philosophical claim about thought; behind each such claim is a really dreadful, impoverished philosophy of mind.