Re:Where the Goblins Came From
by xerox13ster on Thursday April 30, 2026 @12:21AM
(#47958068)
They are state machines so they have a state of being therefore they are beings. Living is an entirely different argument.
> They are state machines
I might have to hard disagree on this one, since my understanding of state machines (the technical term [1] [2]) is that they are determistic, while LLMs (the ai topic of discussion) are probabilistic in most of the commercial implementations that we see.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine
[2] have written some for production use, so have some personal experience here
Even at your link it immediately says that there are 2 kinds of automata (a.k.a. FSMs): deterministic and non-deterministic.
In the former, the transition function provides the next state, while in the latter the transition function only provides a probability distribution for the next state, i.e. exactly how running an LLM is implemented.
I see you took the prudent approach of recognizing the being-ness of our future overlords :)
Still, a bit uninspired, methinks. I like AInthropologist better, and my phone's keyboard appears to have immediately adopted that term for the suggestions line. Who am I to fight my phone's auto-suggest :-)