LLMs are immortal? Wait, Hinton said what?

Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather of AI,” just declared: “LLMs are immortal.”

Sounds profound, right? Except it isn’t. It’s a category error.

Yes, if you save the weights of a neural net, you can reload them later. Same weights, same outputs. Big deal. Excel 1995 still gives you the same sum as Excel 2025 if you copy the program. Does that make Excel “immortal”?

Calling this “the very same being” is like saying a photocopier is a resurrection machine. Same file ≠ same life.

Immortality is a word for Beings, not things. And the leap from thing to Being is the actual frontier. That’s where the work is.

So no, Hinton didn’t drop a truth bomb. He dropped a headline. And headlines are cheap.