Does Claude (or any AI agent) have any 'experience'?
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Nope. If we're talking about LLM's, the architecture simply doesn't support 'experiences' as being any part of anything in an LLM. There is a "what is it like to be a cat or a dog" but there isn't for LLM's. An LLM is just software that is programmed to place tokens on the screen, statistically calculating the order in which to place them. Even in "thinking" mode, the model is just doing more of the same which helps get better resulting token outputs. Nowhere in this programming does the model make new, permanent or otherwise, neuron connections, nor does it even have any neurotransmitters for such a process. At this particular time, LLM's can barely store shit in markdown files so they know what Cody was working on before he went to bed last night. SQL databases are starting to get used as "brains" for these systems but even that does not work in a way that 'experiences' do for humans. It's just a file system so, again, they can look up what Cody was working on before he went to bed last night...or shit he doesn't want the agent to do again. I suppose it can look up your birthday in a DB and other stuff like that but an SQL database is far too simple to replicate everything a true experience can do and does do to a human being.
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What do you mean by experience?
To me the there are two contradictory meanings. One is that experience does stuff to you (or the AI). If it's, like, a memory that can influence output or behaviour or whatever. I think AI has that. So do cats.
The other meaning, what people have, is a quality that adds to anything—so in the context of "experience" it's not what experience does to a person—it's what a person does to experience. Each time a person has or accesses experience it's a creative, interpreted, new/different unpredictable process.
I don't think that's the case for anything we know of except people. And I'd argue that by training an AI on existing data, it's actually moving in the opposite direction of creating something that can "experience" in the sense we mean people do.
So by "experience" do you mean what experience does to people/AI or what people/AI do to experience?
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I don't understand the concept of people doing something to experience. Maybe a kickflip would make more sense in discussing machine learning. A better example might be engineering and making a technical drawing of a new type of dunk tank. In theory, that could be done strictly within the scope of bits and bytes. In practice, it actually has been done by numerous humans who have some experience using tools and materials in the real world of cost/availability, structure failure and leakage.
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