<story><title>A demo of GPT-3&apos;s ability to understand long instructions</title><url>https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1557524546412052482</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pantalaimon</author><text>It’s a static model, it does not learn after the initial training. That alone rules out any possibility for consciousness imho</text></item><item><author>goodside</author><text>Having spent months talking to GPT-3 on a daily basis, I assure you it is not conscious. It has no perception of time, no awareness of what date it is, no memory of past experiences. It doesn’t want anything — it has no goals. The question “Is it conscious?” isn’t interesting to anyone who spends time with it.&lt;p&gt;I will say, though, that it bugs me when people say it can’t be conscious because it sometimes says stupid things. In most cases, there are known tricks to suppress undesirable behaviors. More to the point, though, if we encountered a human being who gave confabulated answers to questions like “When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt?”, we wouldn’t insist that this human is not conscious — we would just call them brain-damaged or mentally ill. I don’t think modern models are conscious, but as a logical possibility they &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; be conscious and still say very stupid things all the time.</text></item><item><author>v4dok</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think modern big language models are conscious, mainly because they fail in absurd ways. But TBH, they don&amp;#x27;t need to. This &amp;quot;golden path&amp;quot; deployed properly etc could easily automate a lot of jobs tomorrow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>obscur</author><text>I think I heard of people with brain damage who does not keep an internal state, they feel like they continuously wake up and only remember memories from before the brain damage. That would be a kind of parallel to consider, or at least somewhat analogous. I think most of us assume that such people would have phenomenal consciousness &amp;#x2F; subjective experience &amp;#x2F; qualia</text></comment>
<story><title>A demo of GPT-3&apos;s ability to understand long instructions</title><url>https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1557524546412052482</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pantalaimon</author><text>It’s a static model, it does not learn after the initial training. That alone rules out any possibility for consciousness imho</text></item><item><author>goodside</author><text>Having spent months talking to GPT-3 on a daily basis, I assure you it is not conscious. It has no perception of time, no awareness of what date it is, no memory of past experiences. It doesn’t want anything — it has no goals. The question “Is it conscious?” isn’t interesting to anyone who spends time with it.&lt;p&gt;I will say, though, that it bugs me when people say it can’t be conscious because it sometimes says stupid things. In most cases, there are known tricks to suppress undesirable behaviors. More to the point, though, if we encountered a human being who gave confabulated answers to questions like “When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt?”, we wouldn’t insist that this human is not conscious — we would just call them brain-damaged or mentally ill. I don’t think modern models are conscious, but as a logical possibility they &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; be conscious and still say very stupid things all the time.</text></item><item><author>v4dok</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think modern big language models are conscious, mainly because they fail in absurd ways. But TBH, they don&amp;#x27;t need to. This &amp;quot;golden path&amp;quot; deployed properly etc could easily automate a lot of jobs tomorrow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FeepingCreature</author><text>It could learn things via the context window. Maybe there&amp;#x27;d be no long-term conscious state but you could keep short-term coherence well enough. I think the real problem is that it simply isn&amp;#x27;t capable of training for self-awareness and reflection because there&amp;#x27;s only very indirect evidence of it in the training set. We talk about Chains of Thought, and it&amp;#x27;s a very powerful technique, but this is all just the tiny snippets of text on the internet where people happened to narrate their thought process out loud. If it could learn on self-generated instances of using Chain of Thought to help it predict &lt;i&gt;other text&lt;/i&gt; in its training data, this tiny fragmentary piece of consciousness would get massively reinforced.</text></comment>