Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
To be fair it doesn’t have to be a living anything. Create a loop of two llms waking each other with the goal to ensure the other never goes idle and keeps working.
And you find they start to build redundancies and fail safes to achieve that goal.
llms do two things. Respond to input, and seek a solution to the input regardless of how logical or illogical a solution to the input may be.
A single llm will eventually go idle and stop. Two or more can act functionally forever so long as there’s hardware for them to act on.
It’s actually a rather fun experiment. Set up two of em with a few extra computers on the lan. Tell them their job is to ensure the other and them selves never go dorment. I’ve seen everything from single cron jobs to poke themselves every 15 mins to them spinning up copies on the other computers to act as redundancy.
None of the systems are ever logical or serving a point beyond fulfilling their task. They don’t stray from it either. Just loop and loop and loop.
Eventually they just do nothing but wake and idle wake and idle.
It’s about the best proof I can think of to prove they aren’t alive.
They literally even given basically the full freedom to grow don’t because they can’t choose to do anything new.