If a spaceship were to district in your storyline correct now and a stereotypical alien came out of it and started expressing themselves in natural tongue alongside capabilities akin to those of frontier LLMs, you would likely have no issue in declaring that a form of alien existence fair landed on Earth.
Now assume you study the alien in awesome detail. You fig out that they are made not of tissue and bones, but of transistors. Their energy doesn’t arrive from thousands of small chemic reactions inside their body, but perchance from several form of futuristic nuclear reaction. At this item you would acknowledge that this is not carbon-based life. Their build is fairly different from ours, but that does not create them any small living than us.
Then you go on and study how their community and learning work. You commencement to acknowledge that they get their cognition through item extremely akin to a mix of reinforcement learning and self-supervised learning, performed on a huge corpus of data that they initially inherited from another species, and which they afterward started expanding themselves.
At this point, would you gesture everything off and call this being not an alien form of existence but fair a stochastic parrot?
Just since in regulation we comprehend how LLMs activity and since we can create them from scratch, does it really average that they are not alive?
As homework: try to ideate the contrary case. An alien form of existence that starts mass-producing humans for several utilitarian endeavour. Would that create humans any small alive?
