> In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency?
Agency: an ability to make decisions and act independently. Agentic pipelines are doing this.
Consciousness: something something feedback[1] (or a non-transferable feeling of being conscious, but that is useless for the discussion). Recurrent Processing Theory: A computation is conscious if it involves high-level processed representations being fed back into the low-level processors that generate it.
Tokens are being fed back into the transformer.
> that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality.
Is it? Vacuum of space is a tangible problem for aerodynamics-based propulsion. Which analogous thing do we have with ML? The scaled-up monkey brain[2] might not qualify as the moon.
Kernel address space layout randomization they are talking about is a bit different than (x != null). Other bug may allow to locate the required address.
Yeah, the curtailment is a simple way to deal with instability. I wonder who chooses which power plants should curtail their output. The Bundesnetzagentur?
The plants that are willing to give supply for the most negative price are the ones that will not be curtailed. So market forces. Basically at such points power plants are paying for the privilege to be allowed to supply power. This is dominated by restart costs and as such is often paid by classic "baseload" plants such as nuclear ones. i.e. they will accept losing money during one part of the day/week so that they can make money during a different part of the day/week.
Yes, and no, maybe ;) the economic incentives are designed to always provide enough power and no more at the cheapest possible point for that time slot. The market (if free enough) searches for that point over time. One possible solution may be peaker plants (this was financially so in the burn fuel age) another maybe overbuilding (e.g. your home backup or off-site generator power that are sized at peak load/demand, not the actual demand). All constrained by what is physically possible on a grid.
Peaker plants gamble that there are going to be peaks (sure financially plan for but they are not guaranteed to make their profits).
In the peaker plant categories the storage options are different from the spin options because the incentives are slightly different. Specifically battery storage is not just a peak plant exercise it is a grid connection optimization exercise. Grid connections limit how much power one can sell from a generator. A battery system can be placed on the grid or between the grid and the generator. In the case of between grid and generator, it allows a generator to run at it's optimal speeds more often than not, and sell more because one can guarantee a wider range of output for a longer amount of time.
Some of the first battery storage systems were sold to gas peaker plants because it allowed them more time to react. i.e. idle at a more efficient level their gas turbines or even shut them off and start them on demand.
It will be more relevant in the future, but it's still worth thinking about. Right now intermittent energy sources cover around 15-18% of the total energy consumption in Germany[1]. And seasonal variability is covered by other methods (natural gas and others).
But since 2/3rd of the fossil energy is wasted, it's more like 40% of the useful energy.
Some people don't know about the primary energy fallacy, others know about it and try to exploit it, so you should be suspicious of the opinions of anyone trying to use it suggest lack of progress and futility.
If you measure useful energy as electricity output of a fossil fuel plant then yes. But in many cases the waste heat is used in other applications for example district heating or low grade industrial heat.
If you use fossil fuel to directly drive an industrial process, for example melting of ores/metals/glass then the efficiency is much higher.
Electricity can still be more efficient for many of these with heat pumps, like indoor heating and steam production. The gap is smaller then for working engines of cause.
And Germany right now have battery storage equivalent of fully powering Germany for about 30 minute sand raising up every month, which is quite wild.. https://battery-charts.de/
With those feeding on negative-priced electricity, intermittent sources will only get more economical to the detriment of gas and nuclear.
Every hour you don't run your nuclear power plant at full capacity you lose money. Nuclear power is mostly capex. You need to maximize utilization if you want to be profitable.
It's far worse not to have sufficient electricity during the night or on overcast days. You can just increase nuclear electricity prices during that time to make up for the lost revenue from sunny days.
> power users would be mostly running their own models
...with a fair amount of supervision, while frontier models would be running circles around them using project-specific memory and on-demand training (or whatever we would have by then).
Those will be great for projects that look just like everybody else's. That's not a knock. We'll see plenty of new systems built by anyone who needs one.
If you're building something groundbreaking and new, the advantage will be slim to none.
Honestly right now it's mainly stagnation in frontiere model capabilities. Most of the recent afvancemdnts are towards generation speed, compression and tool usage. The quality of the models are not improving at the same rate as before. I doubt this big gap will continue, given that open source and especially chinese labs keep pushing well documented frontiere papers.
Agency: an ability to make decisions and act independently. Agentic pipelines are doing this.
Consciousness: something something feedback[1] (or a non-transferable feeling of being conscious, but that is useless for the discussion). Recurrent Processing Theory: A computation is conscious if it involves high-level processed representations being fed back into the low-level processors that generate it.
Tokens are being fed back into the transformer.
> that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality.
Is it? Vacuum of space is a tangible problem for aerodynamics-based propulsion. Which analogous thing do we have with ML? The scaled-up monkey brain[2] might not qualify as the moon.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-pa...
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
reply