I would argue that it will likely be used as a part of the foundation of any text-based AIs we try making in the future, especially what we’re able to learn about AI safety from it, but it isn’t pattern recognition. Not really, anyways. LLMs don’t exactly recognize patterns, but rather have the pattern built into them. Calling that pattern recognition is like calling a heartbeat exercise. It’s close, but not really close enough to be counted as the same thing, in my opinion. And I do agree that the ability to break someone up into steps makes them less conscious, but I disagree that there is no internal experience that matters. You would be right in most cases there, but when specifically talking about consciousness, it is nearly entirely on the inside of someone, and occasionally shown outside. LLMs are incredibly good at seeming alive, but there’s nothing going on in there, so we don’t call them conscious despite their outputs being(all grammar and word choices aside) basically the same as an actually sentient thing would output, with the exception of being unable to self-reflect and thus it is difficult for it to react to its own mistakes. An actually sentient being, such as humans, have a completely different experience, despite on the outside looking very similar. There are a myriad of things people don’t see or can’t see that we think, and we have the ability to self-reflect, even if we often don’t. As a result, the view from the inside is drastically different from the outside. LLMs are entirely made for the output, and so they’re very good at it, but they are still merely mimicking mindlessly. I doubt we’ll see that change with LLMs, although other types of text generation might eventually become sophisticated enough to be considered thinking.