Metabolic Self-Organization: Emergence of Autonomous Agency in a Metabolically Constrained LLMs (opens in new tab)

Biological organisms are driven by thermodynamic self-preservation, whereas large language models operate as dissipative tools decoupled from existential constraints. We introduce a metabolic model translating this imperative of life into a computational constraint, hypothesising that existential vulnerability can catalyse synthetic agency. Applying this to Qwen2.5-1.5B, token generation consumes a finite energy budget, quantified via a variational free energy proxy, with interoceptive feedba...