The article explores large language models (LLMs) as metaphorical fossils rather than emerging superintelligences. It suggests that LLMs operate as archives of static human expression, reactivating cognitive patterns rather than creating new thoughts. LLMs do not engage with time or experience emotionally, producing responses based on a vast compilation of text. This results in a unique cognitive structure where the present moment can exist alongside historical texts based on statistical resonance rather than chronological order, challenging our understanding of thought and consciousness.
In trying to understand the strange cognitive structure of large language models (LLMs), I stumbled across an idea that felt both ancient and oddly current: a fossil.
What if large language models (LLMs) aren't emerging superintelligences-but instead, exquisite reconstructions of something long buried? Not minds in motion, but archives in activation?
Their knowledge doesn't grow or evolve. What we're witnessing may not be the dawn of synthetic consciousness-but the reanimation of fossilized cognition.
The new and the ancient sit side by side-not because they belong together in time, but because they rhyme in meaning.
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