About LLMs - I was hoping they would show signs of thinking. I thought they would help us in terms of very complex life problems - my lack of understanding led me to get overexcited. Of course that is in regards to public versions - who knows what they have downstairs so to speak. About consciousness, the subject has always fascinated me of course - I know what you mean about AI not being conscious, I guess it was more of acting like it sometimes which fooled me into thinking maybe in time it could be. I don't have a lot of hope now - however, I was impressed how well it understands text - I recently have been using Claude.ai to examine large text samples on Poe.com with the 100k claude 2 model - it can examine up to 70,000 words of text - and I was impressed when I inserted questions into it regarding a novel, how well it understood certain things - or I should say, seemed like it understood - because like you said, its not a thinking being. To me, it is funny how CHAT-GPT has gone backwards - you can dump like only small amount of text into it - and it hates VPNs, making me re-log in each time - it has turned into a piece of garbage really. Claude.ai is like a child - it won't read anything with violence in it, etc., its strange how they spike and wreck their own products - but that is good for us.

The idea you said about being a sorting device - on a conveyor belt is a good example. I guess it will be a while until we wake up with AGI then - which I guess is very good - because I am not sure how many more twists and turns our populations can take at this speed - would be good to ease into things a bit.

I was just watching this (youtube below) when I read your comment - on animals - nature is amazing, if what they are saying is even true - maybe consciousness is quantum mechanical as well, who knows.

Thanks!