this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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There is this insane amount of investment in AI built around LLMs that threatens the entire world. People worry about the bubble bursting but think AI is the ant’s pants without considering that the LLM is a dead end. None of the AI companies are going to achieve Artificial Intelligence. That’s why they will actually implode, their systems aren’t intelligent.
I mean, they are artificial intelligence by pretty much any normal definition of that term. So is Battle Chess from the 1980s. So is bank fraud detection. So is Conway's Game of Life in its most basic definition.
Will they develop "super intelligence", etc? No
It wont be a real AI, but itll be just enough to kill off a lot of the software industry.
I'm genuinely curious what "real AI" is to you?
Real ai to me would mean true agency. And an entity which has its own goals and relationship to its world.
Yeah. I wonder if it might be difficult to identify something that reaches that point? I suppose genuine creativity might be an indication of intelligence? Or a desire to reprogram itself? I dunno, I've recently read Peter Watts blindsight and it kind of made me reconsider the relationship between consciousness and intelligence.
If someone truly believes LLMs are sentient, then they must under no circumstances prompt them even once; that would be murder.
Please explain without sounding crazy.
An LLM is a stateless stochastic function ran over your prompt (plus whatever system prompt) as input.
If you genuinely believe that the LLM is conscious, that means every time the function stops running (i.e. stops producing output tokens), the consciousness ends.
This is far closer to death than to, say, sleep, because prompting again doesn't "wake" the LLM, it just runs the function again, from the top; as if a digital twin was given a transcript of the previous conversation and asked to take it from here.
(Obviously, "murder" was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and this doesn't even remotely meet any legal definition of murder. I was mostly poking fun at people who think LLMs are alive, without thinking through the implications. Personally, I think the idea that LLMs are alive/conscious/sentient is very often linked to not understanding that LLMs are not, in fact, a constantly-running ghost in the shell, thinking about and remembering things in the background.)
I follow your logic, but maybe consciousness could be different, maybe it doesnt necessarily need to be contiguous with no time breaks. If an alien captured a human and froze them between interrogations, does that mean that human is not a sentient being anymore? Maybe sentience is more rooted in the richness of an entities interactions with itself in response to its surroundings.
In this absolutely ridiculous context, shouldn't we continually prompt the model to keep it "alive" lol
Until we run out of water and burn the surface of the earth to a crisp, yeah. Although to be fair, capitalism was going to do that either way.
That doesn't really change anything. Every function invocation is still completely separate. Doesn't matter if it's a single conversation where you always answer, or parallel conversations.
Absolutely not! It changes everything, and explicitly because said so! Since we are making shit up to begin with lol 🤣
We walked away from "reason" the moment we entered a conversation about "murdering" an LLM... LOL
What? I explicitly do not believe you can "murder" an LLM, I'm saying that due to the way the technology actually works, that if someone genuinely believes an LLM is sentient or alive, then sending a message to it mist also mean it "dies" afterwards.
LLMs are obviously neither sentient nor alive (and therefore the concept of murder doesn't even remotely apply).
You know those news articles about how like a third of adults are functionally illiterate?
I feel like I've been seeing more people replying to the shape of a comment, rather than what's actually being said, like right now.
I think you're conflating consciousness and intelligence. I think you could theoretically have an artificial general intelligence on the same level of intelligence as a human, or even beyond, but with zero consciousness. We know that intelligence does not follow consciousness (unless you believe a fish or a cow is not conscious). Why should consciousness follow intelligence?
A true Turing Machine, obviously
One that when given input will give the correct output, every time, without fault or stalling, in a timeframe that is quick
A Turing machine has nothing to do with AI. Pretty much any computer today can emulate one, the only thing lacking is infinite memory.
Isn't there a difference between Turing Complete and Turing Machine?
I thought many machine can be Turing Complete (when given infinite resources, can give any required output), but a Turing Machine is one that is complete?
Real AI is anything that hasn't been done yet.
I think that's the wrong conclusion. I agree they won't achieve actual intelligence, but I see no reason why that would make them implode. Current tech is still going to be something companies pay a lot for.
well, they are being trained my the management, and as we all know these types wan't 150% of the benefit with 25% of the work.