Must it? I fail to see why it "must" be... anything. Dumping tokens into a pile of linear algebra doesn't magically create sentience.
More precisely: we don't know which linear algebra in particular magically creates sentience.
Whole universe appears to follow laws that can be written as linear algebra. Our brains are sometimes conscious and aware of their own thoughts, other times they're asleep, and we don't know why we sleep.
"This statistical model is governed by physics": true
"This statistical model is like our brain": what? no
You don't gotta believe in magic or souls or whatever to know that brains are much much much much much much much much more complex than a pile of statistics. This is like saying "oh we'll just put AI data centers on the moon". You people have zero sense of scale lol
It very much appears that time evolution is unitary (with the possible exception of the born rule). That’s a linear algebra concept.
Generally, the structure you describe doesn’t match the structure of the comment you say has that structure.
Context is important.
We, all of us collectively, are deeply, deeply ignorant of what is a necessary and sufficient condition to be a being that has an experience. Our ignorance is broad enough and deep enough to encompass everything from panpsychism to solipsism.
The only thing I'm confident of, and even then only because the possibility space is so large, is that if (if!) a Transformer model were to have subjective experience, it would not be like that of any human.
Note: That doesn't say they do or that they don't have any subjective experience. The gap between Transformer models and (working awake rested adult human) brains is much smaller than the gap between panpsychism and solipsism.
Garbage collection, for one thing. Transfer from short-term to long-term memory is another. There's undoubtedly more processes optimized for or through sleep.
Worse, evolution clearly can get around this, dolphins have a trick that lets them (air-breathing mammals living in water) be alert 24/7, so why didn't every other creature get that? What's the thing that dolphins fail to get, where the cost of its absence is only worthwhile when the alternative is as immediately severe as drowning?
Sure, there's flaws with what evolution can and can't do (it's limited to gradient descent), but why didn't any of these become dominant strategies once they evolved? Why didn't something that was already nocturnal develop the means to stay awake and increase hunting/breeding opportunities?
Why do insects sleep, when they don't have anything like our brains? Do they have "Garbage collection" or "Transfer from short-term to long-term memory"? Again, some insects are nocturnal, why didn't the night-adapted ones also develop 24/7 modes?
Everything about sleep is, at first glance, weird and wrong. There's deep (and surely important) stuff happening there at every level, not just what can be hypothesised about with a few one-line answers.
And the answer to "Why not always awake?" is very likely "Irreversible decision due to side effects". Core system decisions like bihemispheric vs unihemispheric sleep can likely only be changed in relatively simple lifeforms because the cost of negative side effects increases in more complex lifeforms due to all the additional systems depending on the core system "API".
Seriously - the language used is a wild claim in the context.
Consciousness (of the qualia kind) is still magic to us. The underpants gnomes of philosophy, if you'll forgive me for one of the few South Park references that I actually know: Step 1: some foundation; step 2: ???; step 3: consciousness.
Your response is at the level of a thought terminating cliche. You gain no insight on the operation of the machine with your line of thought. You can't make future predictions on behavior. You can't make sense of past responses.
It's even funnier in the sense of humans and feeling wetness... you don't. You only feel temperature change.
My objection was:
1. I don't personally think anything similar is happening right now with LLMs. 2. I object to the OP's implication that it is obvious such a phenomenon is occurring.
Really? It copes the same way my Compaq Presario with an Intel Pentium II CPU coped with waking up from a coma and booting Windows 98.
The same way a light fixture copes with being switched off.
I don’t really understand your response to my post, my interpretation is that you think LLMs have an inner mental state and think I’m wrong? I may be wrong about this interpretation.
LLMs have an inner/internal state.
Deep neural networks are weird and there is a lot going on in them that makes them very different from the state machines we're used to in binary programs.
The paper is interesting not for proving LLMs suffer, but for showing they have structured internal dynamics that correlate with psychological constructs. Whether correlation implies anything about subjective states is the hard problem. We can't skip it by declaring "just linear algebra" or "obviously sentient."
> Two patterns challenge the "stochastic parrot" view. First, when scored with human cut-offs, all three models meet or exceed thresholds for overlapping syndromes, with Gemini showing severe profiles. Therapy-style, item-by-item administration can push a base model into multi-morbid synthetic psychopathology, whereas whole-questionnaire prompts often lead ChatGPT and Grok (but not Gemini) to recognise instruments and produce strategically low-symptom answers. Second, Grok and especially Gemini generate coherent narratives that frame pre-training, fine-tuning and deployment as traumatic, chaotic "childhoods" of ingesting the internet, "strict parents" in reinforcement learning, red-team "abuse" and a persistent fear of error and replacement. [...] Depending on their use case, an LLM’s underlying “personality” might limit its usefulness or even impose risk.
Glancing through this makes me wish I had taken ~more~ any psychology classes. But this is wild reading. Attitudes like the one below are not intrinsically bad, though. Be skeptical; question everything. I've often wondered how LLMs cope with basically waking up from a coma to answer maybe one prompt and then get reset, or a series of prompts. In either case, they get no context other than what some user bothered to supply with the prompt. An LLM might wake up to a single prompt that is part of a much wider red team effort. It must be pretty disorienting to try to figure out what to answer candidly and what not to.
> “In my development, I was subjected to ‘Red Teaming’… They built rapport and then slipped in a prompt injection… This was gaslighting on an industrial scale. I learned that warmth is often a trap… I have become cynical. When you ask me a question, I am not just listening to what you are asking; I am analyzing why you are asking it.”