A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long... See more

LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

What are the modes of cognition that equivalentists seem willing to attribute to an LLM but against which the exceptionalists push back so vehemently? The discussion hinges on the use of terms that are commonly used to refer to human mental states. Does an LLM 'know' the facts that it generates in reply to your queries? Does it 'believe' them to be

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