What is an LLM? How does it work? Is it conscious? Why is this all happening now?
This is a talk about LLMs I gave at the Village Zendo on January 18, 2026. Here’s the recording, and a written version is below.
OMG AI!!! #
*
I’m going to explain LLMs to the best of my understanding. I’m a computer scientist, though AI isn’t my specialty, but I’ve spent a while catching up and I think the answers to these questions are mostly straightforward. There’s no magic. Large language models like GPT are just doing arithmetic, on a very large scale. I’m going to tell the history of large language models, and how we got here, and how it relates to human minds.
The Turing Test #
Alan Turing, 1912-1954
The story starts with Alan Turing, who is more or less the founder of computer science. In 1949 he proposed a test of artificial intelligence.
*
He called it the imitation game, and everyone else calls it the Turing Test. If a human player exchanges written notes with an unseen human and an unseen computer, and the player cannot guess which is the computer, then the computer has passed the test. There are controversies over how to play the game, and what it means if the computer passes. If a computer seems like a human, does that mean the computer is intelligent? Then what do we mean by intelligence? But it’s a very famous test, and passing it would obviously mean something important.
ELIZA #
Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, 1966
The first program to really try to pass the Turing Test was ELIZA, built by an MIT researcher named Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. It imitates a very annoying psychotherapist who mostly tries to turn everything the patient says into a question. Test subjects chatted with it over a teletype. You can still play with ELIZA today, here’s an interaction I had:
ELIZA, 1966
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems.
> tell me something only a human would
Why do you say that?
> why do i say what?
I'll ask the questions, if you don't mind!
> stop being such a tyrant
My secretary will send you a bill.
> that's funny
What makes you believe that's funny?
> because it made me laugh
Is it because it made you laugh that you came to me?
> that doesn't really make sense
Does it bother you that does not really make sense?