Are LLMs conscious? If you’re sane, the answer is no. It’s all math formulas and data.
An ANN forward pass uses matrix multiplication and activations. The backpropagation pass uses a cost function and derivatives chaining for minimizing that cost. There’s softmax for probabilities. It’s optimized weights and biases. And so on.
If you had lots of time on your hands, and I mean lots, you could do the same training and inference with spreadsheets, or even pen and paper for that matter.
Suppose you did the same sequence of math ops with excel or on paper and said, “Look, it’s conscious, it can express joy and sorrow!!” Well that would be a ridiculous claim, and very funny 🤣. Those methods produce the same output, only much slower.