"LLMs have no self, no beliefs": a forward pass is not a mind
gerardsans · x · 2026-10-05
A widely shared thread argues that words like "self," "beliefs," and "goals" describe people, not LLMs: an output is local and stateless — one query, one context window, sampling from frozen weights; nothing in the residual stream survives the next call. The only carry-over is pasted-back context plus the last token — "that is a transcript. Not a mind. Not a state. Text in, text out."
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