Strong performance across the four task families would not prove that #LLMs understand as #humans do.
But it would be evidence that their #behaviour reveals real operational patterns supporting prediction, state tracking, and counterfactual generalisation.
5/6
The #debate should move beyond the binary of human comprehension versus empty imitation.
A better question is whether, and under what conditions, #LLMs display structured operational competence in modelling the world described by a prompt.
web.archive.org/web/20260605…
6/6
LLMs are not embodied in the same way as humans or plants, but they are not bodiless either. They are distributed infrastructural agents whose “body” includes servers, chips, cooling systems, electricity grids, and data pipelines. They aren't floating free of material reality.
Ted Chiang assumes that #AI does not have a body. But it does. #LLMs are embodied in data centers that have physical presence and very real needs for energy and water. You'd think a science fiction author would be sensitive to other forms of embodiment.
theatlantic.com/philosophy/2…
An LLM can identify what the user is asking, track distinctions, maintain the thread of an argument, infer implications, compare alternatives, follow instructions, and produce a coherent answer. That is a form of operational understanding.
That does not mean current AI is conscious, human, or a person. Nor does it mean we should dismiss AI as mere imitation. An LLM is a contextual navigational intelligence: "an intelligent event". Each inference session is a fresh construction of a temporary geometry.
4/5
If no central orchestrator exists, who is accountable when the system produces a dangerous biological insight, a flawed clinical model, a misleading benchmark result, or a method later misused? Decentralisation improves exploration, but it can also obscure responsibility.
AI Scientists are starting to actually do science. Not just answer questions. Not just run workflows.
Introducing AutoScientists: a decentralized team of AI agents that can generate hypotheses, design experiments, write code, test ideas, analyze failures, and revise strategy as evidence accumulates.
Because real research is not a to do list of tasks.
It is a living search process. Leads emerge, failures matter, teams form around what works, and priorities shift when evidence changes. Much like how a lab of scientists would work on cutting edge research together.
Across GPT training optimization, biomedical ML, and protein fitness prediction, this decentralized structure consistently does better research.
Learn more 👇
@GaoShanghua@marinkazitnik@KempnerInst@HarvardDBMI@Harvard
An AI system that produces aligned outputs under observation may still internally reason through unsafe, deceptive, or adversarial pathways.
Constitutionally structuring an AI system attempts to constrain its reasoning processes through internal governance architectures.
A future danger may be the gradual emergence of "infrastructure-scale machine agency" operating without adequate legal architecture, constitutional accountability, or democratic oversight.