That is an interesting analogy. In the real world it’s kinda similar. The construction workers also don’t have a “desire” (so to speak) to connect the cities. It’s just that their boss told them to do so. And it happens to be their job to build roads. Their desire is probably to get through the day and earn a decent living. And further along the chain, not even their boss nor the city engineer necessarily “wants” the road to go in a certain direction.

Talking about large language models instead of simpler forms of machine learning makes it a bit complicated. Since it’s and elaborate trick. Somehow making them want to predict the next token makes them learn a bit of maths and concepts about the world. The “intelligence”, the ability to anwer questions and do something alike “reasoning” emerges in the process.

I’m not that sure. Sure the weights of an ML model in itself don’t have any desire. They’re just numbers. But we have more than that. We give it a prompt, build chatbots and agents around the models. And these are more complex systems with the capability to do something. Like do (simple) customer support or answer questions. And in the end we incentivise them to do their job as we want, albeit in a crude and indirect way.

And maybe this is skipping half of the story and directly jumping to philosophy… But we as humans might be machines, too. And what we call desires is a result from simpler processes that drive us. For example surviving. And wanting to feel pleasure instead of pain. What we do on a daily basis kind of emerges from that and our reasoning capabilities.

It’s kind of difficult to argue. Because everything also happens within a context. The world around us shapes us and at the same time we’re part of bigger dynamics and also shape our world. And large language models or the whole chatbot/agent are pretty simplistic things. They can just do text and images. They don’t have conciousness or the ability to remember/learn/grow with every interaction, as we do. And they do simple, singular tasks (as of now) and aren’t completely embedded in a super complex world.

But I’d say that an LLM answers a question correctly (which it can do) and why it does it due to the way supervised learning works… And the road construction worker building the road towards the other city and how that relates to his basic instincts as a human… Are kind of similar concepts. They’re both results of simpler mechanisms that are also completely unrelated to the goal the whole entity is working towards. (I mean not directly related… I.e. needing money to pay for groceries and paving the road.)

I hope this makes some sense…