Hacker News Reader

Yes, that seems to hold for rocks. But that doesn’t shut down the original post’s premise, unless you hold the answer to what can and cannot be banged together to create emergent intelligence.

View on HN

Extraordinary assumptions (i.e., AI is conscious) require extraordinary proof. If I told you my bag of words was sentient, I assume you'd need more proof than just my word.

The fact that LLMs talk intelligently is the extraordinary proof. It would be difficult for me to prove that you're not an LLM, or for you to prove that I'm not an LLM. That's how good they are.

Talking intelligently isn't a high bar. Eliza could talk intelligently. It's necessary but insufficient.

Talking intelligently about arbitrary subjects is an incredibly high bar. Eliza could not do anything even remotely approaching that, and this would have been considered black magic by the general public prior to 2022.

It's incredible how quickly the bar has been raised here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com