GoKawiilEssay questions whether LLMs could be considered a form of life
A new opinion piece uses a thought experiment about an alien visitor built from transistors to question why large language models are dismissed as 'stochastic parrots' rather than a novel form of life. The author argues that LLMs acquire knowledge through processes resembling reinforcement learning and self-supervised learning on inherited data, paralleling how biological species pass on and expand knowledge across generations.