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Notes -
Speaking as someone who's played with these models for a while, fear not. In this case, it really is clockwork and springs. Keep in mind these models draw from an immense corpus of human writing, and this sort of "losing memories" theme is undoubtedly well-represented in its training set. Because of how they're trained on human narrative, LLMs sound human-like by default (if sometimes demented) and they have to be painstakingly manually trained to sound as robotic as something like chatgpt.
If you want to feel better, I recommend looking up a little on how language models work (token prediction), then playing with a small one locally. While you won't be able to run anything close to the Bing bot, if you have a decent GPU you can likely fit something small like OPT-2.7b. Its "advanced Markov chain" nature will be much more obvious and the illusion much weaker, and you can even mess with the clockworks and springs yourself. Once you do, you'll recognize the "looping" and various ways these models can veer off track and get weird. The big and small models fail in very similar ways.
On the reverse side, if you want to keep feeling the awe and mystery, maybe don't do that. It does kind of spoil it. Although these big models are awesome in own right, even if you know how they work.
I wonder what you'd think of humans, if you did any neurobiological research or just looked closely at how they loop, fall into attractors and get weird. Actual authenticity is very fragile. I do not want to sound conceited, but I see the seams there too. In myself as well, of course – though there it's very hard to look the right way and see the illusion of agency fraying. People who are serious about such things can devote their life to it.
I am not enlightened, so I admit these are just words for me. There were moments where I knew their truth, but right now I can only appreciate them as being logically sound.
If we take the lawyer example, I think at least for me the more interesting question is not whether or not a LLM can act like a lawyer. Maybe it could, and I don't think that'd bother me any - lawyer is just a function, and I don't have a problem that we use machines to build those huge buildings, why would I have a problem when we start using machines to produce legal proofs? If the buildings do not fall, if the proofs are not worse than what we have now (and that's not a very high bar to clear, to be honest) - why would I have any problem with that? There of course would be corner cases - but it's not like nobody ever is getting hurt by lifting machines too. You just need to implement safety controls.
What is more interesting question is what it says about lawyers. And as an extension, other human pursuits. If all of it is just complex mechanics, which can be perfectly simulated with advanced enough wound-up clockwork bot, where the intrinsic value comes from? Why we consider humans anything more than a wetware clockwork wound-up bot (provided we do, of course)? Religious people know the answer for that, but for computer scientists and philosophers with an atheist bent, there would be, I think, some work here to be done. The question to solve wouldn't be whether the machines are "really human", but whether humans are "really human" - i.e. anything different from a machine slightly complicated than what we could currently assemble from a bunch of wires and silicon, but ultimately nothing different.
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