this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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I believe the people in frontier labs are doing their best to push in that direction.
I believe the investors believe they will have AGIs in a few years.
I believe the human species has throughout history repeatedly proven the height of its hubris and the depth of its stupidity.
I agree with all of those things, but for the last one I see a big example in all of the people not taking the news of a demonstrable global workspace in AI, including models that have been around for years now, as anything big.
People have been insisting that AI can't possibly actually be thinking or have any of the most vaunted aspects of the human mind and that LLMs are a dead end that won't go anywhere for years. We want to be different and special and unique. We always have.
Many of us here went to school when it was still taught that animals weren't really conscious and couldn't be self-aware. Being unwilling to look at new information and honestly assess is hubris and insistence on holding to the thing you've been insisting, it's not a logical analysis.
Over the years we've pointed to several things to insist that AI wasn't special like us, and that it couldn't possibly be because it lacked aspects of the human mind needed for that. Somehow it kept turning out that every thing we pointed to in ourselves ended up being shown to have a very surprisingly similar to nearly direct analogue in those modern LLMs. Last month was jaw dropping, but the bulk of the world has been so focused on the entire world going to hell it hasn't gotten near the attention it deserved yet.
What does it mean to think? This is a open-ended philosophical question and has any number of answers.
I completely agree with your 2nd and 3rd paragraph.
There are similarities and there are clear differences. The reason why we say LLMs are different from us is because we DO have general intelligence, LLMs have not displayed such capabilities despite the intense pressure to prove so. THIS is why we say LLMs couldn't possibly be like us. Because evidence shows they aren't, despite the similarities.
I would be interested to hear what developments in the last month you're referring to, would be exciting to see a breakthrough.