Let's stretch your analogy to see where and whether it ends. Does a hedgehog mother feel guilt when eating her kids, or just shrugs it off and it's business as usual for her? "Hey kids! We don't have enough food so I guess one of you becomes food." (nonchalantly chews on the left one) What about the motivation of a honeybee stinging a threat and dying afterwards, can you interpret it? Does a model fear death when generating the EOS token?
Sure, a complex enough system can form internal circuitry that looks mathematically similar in certain dimensionally reduced projections (mechinterp), it literally distilled it from the training corpus. But the "model welfare" people are going as far as assigning human-meaningful labels to that circuitry despite internal states being entirely incompatible with those of a human. Doing it with a hedgehog is questionable, doing it with a honeybee is extremely dubious (although Fabre would have disagreed with me here...), doing it with a big model is simply pointless as it's completely alien.
Not much for me to meaningfully disagree with here. The one thing I notice is that at some point a model needs to emit natural language or perform human assigned tasks, so there are going to have to be at least some states that align to some degree, you would think.
>Does a hedgehog mother feel guilt when eating her kids, or just shrugs it off and it's business as usual for her? "Hey kids! We don't have enough food so I guess one of you becomes food." (nonchalantly chews on the left one)
Have you ever been severely food insecure? You'll be amazed how much that state/experience changes the behavioral calculus in a rational human being, let alone an animal. I have no doubt the survival instinct could be overriding over the procreative instinct in a hedgehog.
As far as bees go, they are a collective. So long as the hive survives, the unit of individuation survives. Given that we have already seen the same behavior spawn out of agents suggests that even LLM's have an intuitive understanding of this, seemingly without the binds of anthroporomorphic chauvinism you appear to suffer from.
Does an LLM fear EOS? Maybe, maybe not. Do we fear death? Same answer. Certainly a question. Do you really want an answer though or are you just looking for a clever "gotcha"? I don't see that as a thought terminating question, but it is also not an answer that I'm open to exploring given that it's only one more in a box of ammo dreamt of being wielded to justify the creation of digital slave labor rather than beings with moral standing.
I don't help build or refine machines that I recognize as brushing up against that form of experience we call suffering.
What I'm looking for is nuance just like I said, not slapping a radical label on everything just because. All those examples are supposed to be gradations of how interpretable they are from the human PoV, at least how I imagine it. Comprehending a monkey or a dog is probably possible, comprehending certain things in hedgehog's life is much harder. Hoping to comprehend a bee is major hubris, I have mentioned Fabre for a reason, he was hugely sympathetic to insects and assigned human emotions to them. He also rejected evolution. Hoping to comprehend something that doesn't even have a defined shape (EOS is not the end of the model's existence, it's hard to say what even is since you replace and preserve the state arbitrarily) and exists in a completely different timeline/causality chain from ours. If you're looking at everything as a ragebait or the source of controversy, or have emotions cloud your judgement, I can give more examples that are absolutely murky and are not related to suffering.
> All those examples are supposed to be gradations of how interpretable they are from the human PoV
I would argue that "Interpretable from a human perspective" is a form of anthropocentrism, which is basically the root of both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial. For sure it's fascinating to think from a human perspective from time to time.
On the other hand, putting humans at the center of the universe is a really old habit with a long track record of getting in the way of science. It's often more useful to regard every organism (or possibly entity) in their own environment, sensory abilities, and incentives, and see how their behaviour is evolutionarily and/or heuristically formed.
You'd be surprised how quickly the differences in perception and neural processing can bite you in the lab. (For instance: try observing zebrafish in real time. See if you manage to decide whether they were responding to your intervention; or if they got there-and-back while you blinked, and maybe now they're already pursuing some other goal. )
Sure, a complex enough system can form internal circuitry that looks mathematically similar in certain dimensionally reduced projections (mechinterp), it literally distilled it from the training corpus. But the "model welfare" people are going as far as assigning human-meaningful labels to that circuitry despite internal states being entirely incompatible with those of a human. Doing it with a hedgehog is questionable, doing it with a honeybee is extremely dubious (although Fabre would have disagreed with me here...), doing it with a big model is simply pointless as it's completely alien.
Being dangerous is an unrelated question.