Some predictions might be the tokens "I don't know", but that is based on the model mapping your text to those tokens by having seen many similar "I don't know" responses to such contexts, it didn't do any introspective logic to produce that "I don't know", and its possible it actually does know if it followed another branch there so "I don't know" is often not even true.
If they had an introspective part that stops the prediction when its too unreliable it would no longer just be token prediction engine, and I believe we need such a part for them to become what I call smart. I don't think LLM will ever stop being dumb without such an introspective part to them.
And no, that introspective part is not a part of the token predictor. At least not in us humans, the feeling of certainty we have is not a prediction, it is bundled with our thoughts, so we get both "answer is a bear" and "certainty is low", we don't get just one of those as a "prediction".
Will LLM become smart as humans with such an introspective part? I don't know, but I think they will never become as smart as humans without one.
Note: The certainty score has to be per conclusion or response, not per token. You can't evaluate a responses validity by aggregating the weight of each token. Meaning its a logic engine, not token engine, that evaluates the certainty of a statement being correct or not instead of a token being correct or not. That is the level human thinking works at and seems to be dramatically more efficient.
Maybe our ability to reason is not as mystical and special as our ego might hope it to be, and discomfort over LLM's bringing that to light is the root of some people's urge to continuously downplay and discredit them.
(As far as I can tell as a non-neuroscientist, the literature on how our default mode network and prefrontal cortex interact agrees with my assessment - free association and logical verification respectively)
That introspection isn't an illusion, what your consciousness see of your thoughts obviously are tings that has been calculated and aggregated by the brain, so we know the brain calculates and aggregates those thoughts and feelings to produce its results. And we know LLM doesn't do that, it doesn't have a side system that does that sort of introspection.
But it does that introspection, we evolved to make it. If its not useful for anything we wouldn't have evolved it, it can't have been easy to evolve a consciousness so there has to be purpose for it.
Or do you think our consciousness is a magical ghost thing unrelated to the brains workings? I think its pretty obvious that our smarts in part depend on the computations that results in our conscious experience, you need a very strong argument as to why that wouldn't be the case. And broken brains being broken doesn't answer this.
The very second they add this part, it will "just be a dumb token predictor with introspection", mark my words.
AGI is fairly easy to detect for this reason. Does this system make a majority feel you don't have to hire people anymore? If not its not AGI.
Solves what? Chess? No thats not AI, its just a chess bot. Turing test? No, thats not AI, its just a dumb token predictor.
Why would the goalposts stop moving at AGI? I am 100% convinced it will somehow still lack the "gusto" or the "taste" or the "timbre" of real intelligence. You can see it in coding right now, AI has bad "taste" in coding, because really, we can't do a better job critiquing that which is obviously (on occasion) just plain good.
You are moving the goalpost here if you think the chess AI was AGI. All those problems were evidence AI wasn't as smart as humans, not goalposts determining when AI is as smart as humans. The first turing test winner wasn't even an LLM, it was an expert system, so we already knew that test wasn't enough for AGI.
If I want my ox-cart to fly, I need to add wings, but that's probably not all that needs changing.