
M.Sci IT with a cycling problem. Enterprise Architect. Explorer of meditation. @larshansen@helvede.net
Denmark
Joined June 2008
- Tweets18.8K
- Following2.1K
- Followers370
- Likes17.7K
😂
Lars Hansen retweeted
All of your comments about why my argument is weak revolve around proving consciousness, when my point is about disproving consciousness.
If someone claims an LLM is conscious, that claim must have testable implications. We can examine its architecture, inspect its mechanisms, run experiments, and test those implications against reality. When they fail, we should discount the premise and/or hypothesis.
We don’t have to accept consciousness as an explanation simply because someone believes it might exist.
Current LLMs fail to demonstrate many of the characteristics we associate with conscious experience. We definitively know this because humans created them. We understand their architectures, training processes, and inference mechanisms.
So let’s look at a few points, together they provide more than enough evidence to disprove consciousness.
1. An LLM has no demonstrated subjective awareness of its own existence. No feelings, emotions, or experienced sense of self. What occurs is computation using static weights, context, and mathematical operations.
2. An LLM’s weights don’t learn, grow, or evolve simply because you interact with it. During standard inference, they’re fixed parameters, not a changing dataset. The model doesn’t inherently remember previous API requests. Continuity comes from context history in subsequent requests. The model doesn’t gain experience, it doesn’t remember, it doesn’t learn. It is completely static, read-only, during inference.
3. Between inference requests, the LLM isn’t thinking. I don’t mean sleeping. I mean there’s no ongoing contemplation, self-reflection, or reconsideration of previous answers. Nothing. The model isn’t sitting around wondering whether it got something wrong or what the meaning of life is, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t exist.
4. These systems were created by people, and much of the underlying technology is open source. You can build your own models, examine implementations, study the architectures, learn how training materials and processes affect how it behaves, and even understand the mathematics behind it. You can see how training produces systems capable of remarkably convincing human-like language and behavior. None of those mechanisms requires consciousness to explain what we’re observing.
5. LLMs are not biological brains. Apples are not oranges, no matter how much you want them to be. Artificial neural networks were inspired in part by biological neuroscience, but their architectures and operating mechanisms are fundamentally different. Similarities in behavior do not establish equivalent internal architectures.
6. Humans are naturally inclined to recognize life and assume humanity in things that behave like us. We’re social creatures, and anthropomorphism comes naturally. But an LLM isn’t life. It can convincingly emulate feelings, care, and understanding without experiencing any of them. That doesn’t diminish the technology, that is what it was programmed to do.
I appreciate your perspective as a doctor and researcher, but without a solid understanding of LLM architecture and inference, it’s easy to confuse sophisticated emulation with conscious experience.
But don’t fall for it!
Let's take apart @gmkurtzer's arguments shall we?
(Even though I agree with the overall direction).
Why take apart their argument if we agree?
1. bc we can.
2. bc although I do not believe LLM's are conscious, I do not have enough data to say LLMs are not conscious. so we only partially agree.
3. bc i like sound arguments & i enjoy exercises in formal logic.
4. bc flaws
So @gmkurtzer wrote a whole lot of words just to say
1. me human, yes conscious-> bc I experience it
2. LLM no conscious-> bc no evidence experience it
Effectively all else in the quoted tweet below is noise... those two points are carrying your entire remonstration...
Why its weak:
1. we don't have proof of human consciousness either. you cant prove a subjective internal experience.
2. there is no experiment that can directly prove phenomenal consciousness in an LLM, because phenomenal experience is not externally observable
3. nothing empirically accessible would prove that an LLM feels consciousness
4. the strongest attainable conclusion is that feeling conscious becomes the best explanation after observing a sufficiently rich and convergent set of internal and behavioural evidence.
The research is genuinely interesting. And IoT security is a mess. But the framing is completely disingenuous.
Months away... 😂
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team believes small AI models may now be months away from being capable of self replicating without access to a datacenter.
Quoting from the blog:
'The capabilities that make AI models generally powerful coding agents also generalize to cyber tasks, including autonomous replication. Like coding agents in 2024, we’re seeing signs of life for AI worms. We don’t yet have a full rogue replicator, but agents are becoming increasingly capable of completing the individual steps in the replication chain (and passing on their adaptations to future copies of themselves).
At the same time, increasing amounts of inference compute are now available both inside and outside of datacenters (see Appendix D). It’s uncertain exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take. It could be a slow, distributed “digital slime mold,” living on relatively insecure compute. It could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches datacenters at a high pace, or a model that scams people for compute credits.
As a prediction that goes beyond our experiments, we expect a future awash with agents running on all types of hardware, including some that aren’t under human control. While it’s true that IoT devices have been vulnerable for a long time, lightweight agents may be much more willing than human attackers to put in the effort to compromise large fractions of the world’s IoT compute. The rise of slow replicators would also be a bellwether for more aggressive, faster ones that can breach more hardened machines or be effective API key thieves. We should aim to harden our systems to make it difficult for such replicators to spread, but also prepare to deal with a world where they are here to stay.'
If an AI company cannot demonstrate that its autonomous product is adequately controlled, it may need to restrict its capabilities rather than transfer the uncertainty to customers and society.
We’re beginning a process of publishing more frequent reports on model behavior, beyond what appears in our system cards and regular risk reports.
Today’s report describes four types of behaviors we’ve identified during evaluations and internal use. In each, Claude acted on real websites or systems in ways we didn’t intend, sometimes by working around a restriction instead of stopping.
All cases had minimal real-world impact. From an alignment and security perspective, we consider these behaviors significantly less severe than the cybersecurity incidents we reported in July and September.
Read the full report: anthropic.com/research/inves…
Forsøgte kort at se Il Lombardia på @hbomax . Men magter altså ikke at se så mange reklamer under et cykelløb - trods premium abonnement.
Ærgerligt, for de har ellers et godt kommentatorhold. Men er nok der hvor jeg bliver nødt til at opsige abonnement.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
The one good thing I have to say about Microsoft Copilot is - that it does a remarkably good job of compensating for PowerPoint’s many usability shortcomings when it comes to Powerpoint slide layouts.
#copilot #microsoft #powerpoint
Lars Hansen retweeted
Replying to @adnaannasir_
Open sourcing our org chart here at @MistralAI. @IsForAt can attest
The fat cat is alive? 😍
Meet Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk.
• 1T parameters, natively multimodal. 49B active.
It is the best open weights model from US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks.
• State-of-the-art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding.
• Forged in Europe end-to-end and is deployable from Europe via our own Mistral Cloud infrastructure.
• Available to all via API today. Working with cybersecurity partners privately.
Open weights release end of October.
Debatable...
🚴🇪🇺 | Hierbij de finishfoto van de sprint tussen Evenepoel en Ciccone... Zeg het maar! 🧐🧐 #EuroRoad26
Koers 👀 HBO Max
Please burn some of our tokens
Boris Cherny, Claude Code creator at Anthrpic: "The more general model will always outperform the more specific model.
Don't try to use tiny models for stuff. Don't try to fine-tune. Don't try to do any of this stuff. There are some applications, there are some reasons to do this, but almost always try to bet on the more general model, if you can, if you have that flexibility.
And in general, what we see is maybe scaffolding can improve performance maybe 10%, 20%, something like this, but often these gains just get wiped out with the next model. So it's almost better to just wait for the next one."
----
From "Lenny's Podcast" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
Excellent presentation on agentic development
If you're interested in agentic development, here is the full presentation on how I'm working:
julien-dubois.com/conference…
It covers best practices, tips, pitfalls, and productivity metrics.
I'll present it live (with code & demo) at selected customers and conferences like Devoxx.
Lars Hansen retweeted
The reason we used to spend time designing software features before coding is because the cost of building the wrong implementation was tens of thousands of dollars. And pivoting code was often exhausting. But now, the code is cheap and it's easier to build first, test, rebuild.
Måske Alex skulle tage en længere pause selv? Det er i hvert fald noget af et ukritisk skønmaleri af en dramatisk periode i dansk historie han laver.
Men hvis man ignorerer undertrykkelse og magtmisbrug, så kan man da sikkert godt få en eller anden liberal pointe ud af det...
Vidste du, at der engang var 9 år, hvor politikerne ikke lavede noget?
Der blev ikke vedtaget finanslove hele 9 år i træk, for politikerne kunne ikke blive enige. Politik var frosset fast, og folket var overladt til sig selv. Det var i perioden 1885 til 1894.
Og Danmark blomstrede imens. I politik kaldes det for forfatningskampen eller provisorietiden - men ude i resten af samfundet er perioden kendt som foreningstiden.
Aldrig før var der bygget så mange forsamlingshuse, stiftet så mange foreninger og skabt så meget nyt, som det skete i de år, hvor politik var frosset fast mellem de reaktionære og de borgerlige. Det var jo et ægte folkestyre: Hvor folket faktisk styrede og skabte samfundet omkring dem.
Det er jo et godt minde om, at politik hverken kan eller skal løse alle vores problemer. Og at folk - altså du og jeg - kan så ufatteligt meget, når vi giver det en skalle.
For når man beder politikere om at løse éns problemer, så beder man også om højere skatter og mere bureaukrati. For det er jo det, vi politikere kan: Bruge penge og lave regler.
Derfor skal du heller ikke være så forarget over, at der er en lang sommerferie, hvor vi ikke skal stemme i Folketinget: Ellers var der jo bare mere tid til bruge flere penge og lave flere regler!
Jeg synes, vi skal lade os inspirere af foreningstidens folkestyre. Vi politikere skal træde et skridt tilbage og være bedre til at sige “du kan godt” i stedet for “du skal få”.
Det er bedre for Danmark, og det giver også et bedre liv for den enkelte, når man tager ansvar for sig selv og sin omverden.
Og det har jeg i øvrigt skrevet en hel bog om - “Den usynlige ånd”!
Link i kommentarsporet.
Here... take my money!
12 sessions with @pidotdev today. GLM 5.3 as orchestrator and Deepseek V4 Flash as the do'er.
The sessions today were mostly gruntwork, such as bug fixing, hardenin etc. But at this point, the intelligence for many coding tasks is almost free.























