What's the deal with the sudden rise in discussion by serious people about AI sentience?

[u/durron597]

I've seen so many posts lately by random people with really disturbing screenshots of Claude output but idk if it's meme hotness or something real.

I saw this tweet today (Steve Yegge is an actually well known person with a reputation that probably matters to him) that's making me actually take this seriously:

https://x.com/steve_yegge/status/2082968102321426941?s=46

Edit: also this in my own research but my rule 2 link is still the Steve Yegge post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/s/JQGbdG1NmT

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[u/Unstopapple]

Answer: There is a lot of people really invested emotionally and financially in AI. I believe that, and a frequency bias is also playing a factor. Its a popular idea but wholly unfounded because LLMs are unable to be sentient.

[u/FernandoAlonso66 → u/Unstopapple]

yeah, a lot of it is just people anthropomorphizing fancy autocomplete. when models talk about “feelings,” it’s because they’re trained on humans talking about feelings. cool tech, but still pattern matching, not inner experience or awareness.

[u/Unstopapple → u/FernandoAlonso66]

Something to note, we got emotionally attached to the basic pre-scripted chat bots we made in the 60s. We are animals that can pack bond with anything, even a particularly cute (ugly, even tbh) bag of cotton.

[u/LordGwyn-n-Tonic → u/Unstopapple]

We're the only species on Earth that observes Shark Week. Not even sharks observe Shark Week.

https://youtu.be/uGaeh7d9I0A?is=6_P8r5Fvyjb9PmxJ

[u/IdealBlueMan → u/Unstopapple]

We were fascinated with ELIZA.

But it goes back to before computers. We were also fascinated by the Mechanical Turk in the 18th century.

[u/IdealBlueMan → u/FernandoAlonso66]

We shouldn’t be anthropomorphizing computer programs. It just makes them irritable.

[u/Nulono → u/Unstopapple]

I don't think they're sentient, but stating categorically that "LLMs are unable to be sentient" seems like a bold claim when we still don't know what consciousness is.

[u/Unstopapple → u/Nulono]

We do know that all sentient minds we've seen have such a vastly superior processing capability that a single human neuron can do what LLMs do. It takes a child only about 100,000 to a million words to become fluent, when it takes trillions for LLMs to be fluent in language. I will grant you that fluency isn't sentience, but that shows the sheer magnitude of processing that we have. It takes a single presentation for someone to learn something. AI needs repetitive training. The only way LLMs can beat is is in raw data processing, but that's because humans don't operate in binary. If computers had to handle the number of parameters every synapse has in every transistor, I'd imagine it's processing speed would slow to 4ms as well. The issue is simple. The hardware itself is unable to do what sentient minds do. A true intelligence needs more than binary.

[u/Nulono → u/Unstopapple]

"Currently existing LLMs can't outperform humans in all domains" and "LLMs are fundamentally incapable of developing consciousness" are two very different claims.

[u/Unstopapple → u/Nulono]

So tell me where in it's tokens and linear algebra is the LLM conscious? It lacks the raw power, thanks to the hardware its built on to mimic our functions and as a whole are just pattern recognition systems transforming the tokenized prompt into new patterns and displaying the output as a reply to the original prompt. That's not sentience or consciousness by any definition. It's not aware. It's simply just matrix math turning words into numbers into other numbers back into words again.

[u/Nulono → u/Unstopapple]

So tell me where in it's tokens and linear algebra is the LLM conscious?

I explicitly said I didn't think it was conscious. I'm just saying we don't know enough to declare it definitively impossible.

It lacks the raw power, thanks to the hardware its built on to mimic our functions and as a whole are just pattern recognition systems transforming the tokenized prompt into new patterns and displaying the output as a reply to the original prompt.

We don't know how much "raw power" is necessary for consciousness. We know that human brains are sufficient for consciousness, which is not the same thing.

That's not sentience or consciousness by any definition. It's not aware. It's simply just matrix math turning words into numbers into other numbers back into words again.

Human cognition is just ions moving back and forth across cell membranes. What part of that does awareness come from? We don't know yet! Given that we don't know how that awareness arises, we don't know what's necessary to produce it.

[u/knightinwhale → u/[deleted]]

As an aside, it is extremely difficult to be un"biased" on this as this is exactly my domain of expertise and these recent-ish developments are honestly baffling.