Sort of. I'm talking about the lack of recurrence specifically. In nature, brains are recurrent - they are full of loops where internally computed state is looped back into the network at a "previous" layer (brains are not strictly layered like our machine imitations of them are). This is in contrast to LLMs, which are strictly feed-forward and do not have internal loops. I believe that this recurrence is where "intelligence" lives - and I believe it is the difference between a thinking being and a stochastic parrot.

You could claim that the prompt and the context fill that role in an LLM, but I don't believe they are equivalent because the internal state in an LLM gets compressed down to a token which is then added back into the context, as compared to that state continuing to change within the network itself.

It's a little hard to explain, so I'm sorry if this seems like rambling.

But I believe it matters, and ties into running without sensory input, precisely because without sensory input you would in fact be perfectly capable of doing something. You would be capable of developing a desire and planning to achieve it without any prompting, without sight, without sound, etc. This is in stark contrast to LLMs, which will not do anything without a prompt.

An LLM may say complete the sentence "I am feeling ___" but it doesn't actually have feelings that exist without that prompt. There is no recurrent network where "bad", "good", "happy" might live before the query. It can't sit there, start to feel bad, and then seek a way out of its own volition.

That changes how dangerous something is because if a malicious prompt encourages an LLM to hack something, and you change the prompt, the "impulse" to hack something is gone. If you stop prompting it, it doesn't do anything at all. It just sits there. A living being will act on it's own, and that makes a huge difference in how dangerous something can be. It's the difference between a tool and an actual being.

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To hone it a little further, if I took your brain out of your head and stuck it in a jar but kept it alive, it would probably make you angry. And if I then gave you power - like the ability to use the network - you may be motivated to use that power to attack me.

If I take an LLM and stick it in a jar... nothing. It's paused. It's awaiting a prompt. It's not secretly building plans to hack my pacemaker and make my heart explode.