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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   24677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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There's no probably! It's not building a model! It can't, because there is no facility for doing that. "its memory bank of our previous interactions" is literally just text it spit out at the end of an inference that gets saved to a file and added to future prompts.

You could go read about how these LLMs actually work instead of speculating in darkness, why not do so?

The model it builds--what types of people do certain things, how it relates to their perspective on the world--is in the weights, not in the preamble. The memory bank is only for identifying which type of person is prompting the LLM; the actual model of P(vote|person likes horror fiction, fine press, math) doesn't reside in the bank.

There's no probably! It's not building a model! It can't, because there is no facility for doing that.

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure you are wrong here -- it seems LLMs are able to construct rudimentary models. Here's an excerpt from a post I made a couple weeks ago:

I decided to test this idea that LLMs are unable to model the world by creating a very simple game; in order to play the game it's necessary to have a simple model of the game state. As expected, the LLM made numerous errors.

But what was interesting was that I pointed out the errors to the LLM and it told me that it could fix these problems. And it did so in an interesting way: After each move in the game, it spelled out the game state in text. After that, it stopped making errors. Admittedly, this is a very cumbersome way to model the world -- by means of an iterative written description. But it seemed to work well for this very simple game. To my mind, this was rather astonishing and shocking. And if there is a cumbersome way to accomplish something, you can usually count on computers to accomplish it anyway by means of throwing more and more processing power at the situation. (Actually, that's not totally true, since some tasks have exponential or even combinatorial time complexity. But still.)

You could go read about how these LLMs actually work instead of speculating in darkness, why not do so?

Or one could even test them oneself.

To be sure, I strongly suspect that LLMs are currently not good enough at modeling to be conscious.

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