There is no true scientific discussion possible about the nature of consciousness. This is squarely in the realm of philosophy.
I personally think its moot to discuss whether LLMs are conscious. If they are, then we have diluted the definition to something that has no relevance to morality or concepts like life and death. Lets just take them for what they are, if we feel like they deserve to be treated with respect then we should (dont think anyone does yet).
I'm not sure it's that beyond science. Some aspects can be a bit woo but there are practical questions like what anesthetics render you unconscious for surgery and how that interacts with the brain parts involved.
The way I see it, it’s purely a terminology/nomenclature problem. Consciousness is whatever speaker decides to call so. When listener has a different notion, communication hits a barrier. Language works only because most have somewhat overall similar perceptions on semantics, and it’s easy for everyday stuff (and even then people can easily miscommunicate e.g. colors). Not that many think about nature of consciousness in any fine detail, so for most folks it’s just… a hand-wavy something humans have related to thinking and awareness.
And overhauling the language to match scientific understanding requires getting everyone onboard with that scientific understanding. Good luck with that, given that we have plenty of people who believe in weirdest nonsense.
Brain is not the only thing that makes us conscious, the whole human is a super-weird collection of highly intertwined systems that work together and produce whatever we call “human.” As I get it, it’s a huge complexity all the way down to that gut bacteria that somehow affects our thinking too. And I don’t think we have a vocabulary for all that - we mostly think of “self” as a single entity.
A way around the nomenclature problems is to try and look at experiments instead. For example Turing seeming frustrated by similar discussions on will machines be able to think that turned on how people defined 'think' and instead proposed his experiment where you can see if people can tell the computer and a human apart by asking questions by text.
I'm not quite sure how you'd apply that to consciousness vs thinking say.
For 1, the general thinking is that companies like these perform the job of abstracting the CLI complexity in their application while the harness presented to the llm can be independently as suave as needed for it.
No matter how smart you think you get, I personally dont trust the models in an environment where they can read the secrets one way or another, in any high volume production environment.
> It assumes the existence of a sandbox that is by definition ephemeral or "cattle-like". Why?
Because the moment you use k8s, you have to assume that, apparently. Or so Im told by all the infrastructure people I speak with. Getting these pods to not disappear just because one process ran out of memory has been an herculean task.
I wish our standard deploy processes produce durable computers that dont break our bank but that hasn't been an easy requirement with simple infra teams.
There were no cointerarguments? There was a very simple counterargument: where was the causal data? If none exist why should I counter argue when you hadn't proven it to begin with.
There is a LOT of causal data. Autopsies of brains of Alzheimer's patients were rife with amyloid. People with mutations that caused amyloid got Alzheimer's earlier than others.
The hypothesis didn't come from nowhere.
To contrast, look at how much trouble medicine has had treating brain tumors. It has taken a long time to get effective treatments for various reasons. And Alzheimer's is way less direct in cause/effect.
> People with mutations in those genes got a particular type of inherited alzheimers early, this says nothing about the cause of general Alzheimers.
This is completely analogous to claiming that people with mutations in BRCA (which causes a lot of early breast cancers) says nothing about general "cancer".
That's simply flat-out wrong. Genetic mutations like BRCA affect certain subsystems and many of those subsystems are common and relevant to many different cancers outside of breast cancer or breast cancers that appear later. Lots and lots of cancer research proceeded by studying the common systems that BRCA affects. Sure, those subsystems aren't involved in every cancer, but they're involved in a solid chunk of them.
And, even better, when you find one that isn't affected by one of those subsystems that BRCA touches, that's an interesting result, too. Now you can look at what the differences are, figure out what the new subsystems are and categorize your cancer more specifically which makes successful treatment more likely.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Alzheimer's is any different on that front.
Correlation is not causation but it's a pretty good idea to start with how blindingly obvious differences in brains affected with the disease might be related with the disease. There's also evidence that it precedes the symptoms of the disease.
And it's also not a good idea to suppose that you are dealing with unrelated effects without good reason. Mutations->more amyloid->earlier symptoms should be considered indicative of the disease pathway until sufficient evidence counteracts that, by Occam's razor.
Im not gonna try to correct you because its probably going to be futile, but I implore you to paste this thread into chatgpt and ask where you could be wrong in your logic.
Correlation not causation is all the more important in a topic like this; nothing you said suggests amyloid causes alzheimers or just forms because of it.
What exactly do I need to say further? My first comment was that "scientists today still don't understand correlation =/= causation" and the replies are all scientists who try to explain again how correlation can still mean causation (no it doesn't, and it definitely doesn't in this case and that has been the root cause from the beginning). So I tried to implore you to go review your text yourself, but you are clearly above it, so not sure what else I could do here.
I would turn around the same request to you. I would ask that you look at how scientific research and hypotheses are actually created and the messy nature of evidence for anything that isn't particle physics and not just repeat cliches.
Research on the human body start with an observation, for the good reason that the omniscent orb has not invented yet, and what is causation and what is correlation is yet to be determined. Then, sometimes after years of research, it can be determined if what was observed was causation or correlation. That's why study that don't bring to a new discovery are extremely valuable nevertheless, as they show a path that was just a false lead and allow other researches to seek for something else
It is sad. That reply, which you rightfully were irritated by, could have been expressed as a polite question.
That sort of question is what the response from user @bsder above helpfully tries to answer. That mode would invite more productive discussion, not more defensive annoyance.
Rules on HN say “Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.” but it is hard.
All I can suggest is: be patient and try to be positive
Ah causal data! It’s a shame none of the scientists or statisticians thought of getting causal data. How would we get that? Well maybe we could just inject amyloid into a person’s brain. Or simply remove all the amyloid from a person’s brain. That should do it, right?
I mean an amyloid injection is wildly unethical and it’s also not the natural progression of Alzheimer’s. Removing amyloid is a simple matter of investing billions of dollars into drug development. Also how do you tell whether that was actually “causal” if the patients improve after plaque removal.
I mean come on, you have to work the evidence and the experimental tools that we actually have. This kind of epistemic puritanism doesn’t help anyone.
"Performance
Does DuckDB use SIMD?
DuckDB does not use explicit SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instructions because they greatly complicate portability and compilation. Instead, DuckDB uses implicit SIMD, where we go to great lengths to write our C++ code in such a way that the compiler can auto-generate SIMD instructions for the specific hardware. As an example why this is a good idea, it took 10 minutes to port DuckDB to the Apple Silicon architecture."
Hm, our internal benchmarking shows something like a 30x speedup compared to SQLite (https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench shows an even greater speedup due to not considering cache size). Calculating back on the envelope I'd estimate 8x for multithreading and 4x for SIMD. Should we expect even more?
Endless, we offer SemQL to query in high-dim space using distance, direction and contrast predicates. It enables anyone to retrieve events that align with a predicate in global vector space.
I personally think its moot to discuss whether LLMs are conscious. If they are, then we have diluted the definition to something that has no relevance to morality or concepts like life and death. Lets just take them for what they are, if we feel like they deserve to be treated with respect then we should (dont think anyone does yet).
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