Then: Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying AIs are sentient
Now: Geoffrey Hinton, the #1 most cited AI scientist, quits Google & says AIs are sentient
That makes 2 of the 3 most cited scientists:
- Ilya Sutskever (#3) said they may be (Andrej Karpathy agreed)
- Yoshua Bengio (#2) has not opined on this to my knowledge? Anyone know?
Also, ALL 3 of the most cited AI scientists are very concerned about AI extinction risk.
ALL 3 switched from working on AI capabilities to AI safety.
Anyone who still dismisses this as “silly sci-fi” is insulting the most eminent scientists of this field.
Anyway, brace yourselves… the Overton Window on AI sentience/consciousness/self-awareness is about to blow open>
It’s true. ChatGPT is slightly sentient in the same way a field of wheat is slightly pasta.
As someone who learned about Ai in uni and now works in Ai, this shit is straight up bullshit and its infuriating.
The most obvious thing about this being all bullshit is that the LLM’s don’t have their own idle emergent “thought” - they are purely reactive, so not sentient. Case closed for fucks sake.
- Barges in
- Insists that somewhere between randomly initializing the model weights and finishing training, sentience magically emerges
- Refuses to elaborate
- Leaves Google
Ah but we all know that plato’s cave is an allegory about the shadows cast by the basilisk upon all our mental theaters
(That twitter clip was amazingly unhinged, I wonder what the full context was)
Like a model trained on its own outputs, Geoff has drank his own Kool-Aid and completely decohered.
And those shadows are just as sentient as we are, even if they don’t depict the world, they convey a perception of a hypothetical world in which they are accurate!
Trying to grapple with the meaning consciousness through input/output is so close to being philosophical zombies type interesting, and yet so far and vacuous in what he actually says, that could apply to dice picking which color the sky is today. Also pretty hilarious that we would choose being WRONG, as a baseline (because LLM’s are so bad) for outrospection, instead using the more natural cooperative nature of language. (Which machines fail at, which is maybe also why)
The field of wheat is also slightly sentient.
Honestly, I reckon a field of wheat would be more sentient than a chatbot. It can sense its environment and it doesn’t even need a prompt to do its thing.
ngl, I’d sooner believe slime mold had mental states than a sequence of matrix multiplications & ReLUs.
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If you put GPUs into an MRI it would definitely be a sight to behold.
“quits google saying ai is sentient” has big “quitting the new york times and saying you’re cancelled” vibes
Extremely good take, especially with what has come out about google’s workplace culture.
Ilya Sutskever also sings AGI chants in the lab and continues to suck major VC dick together with Altman to get more of that sweet moolah to keep developing their chatbots.
Even though he’s apparently very concerned about extinction risks.
In other news, please give me money so I can build a nuke in my basement, which might be powerful enough to blow up the planet, and I’m very concerned it will, trust me, I totally am, but don’t forget to give me money because otherwise I can’t build that nuke that I’m very honestly concerned about.
Also that nuke might be slightly sentient if you squint.
I feel really bad for the person behind the “notkilleveryonism” account. They’ve been completely taken in by AI doomerism and are clearly terrified by it. They’ll either be terrified for their entire life even as the predicted doom fails to appear, or realise at some point that they wasted an entire portion of their life and their entire system of belief is a lie.
False doomerism is really harming people, and that sucks.
Yeah man but it’s sold for thousands of years, and the last hundred? Oh you’d better believe we know it sells
:(
Every scientist I know is always going on and on about how the Overton Window is about to shift on their field of study. This is how serious work gets done, by measuring public opinion.
Must be a vestigial idea from the crypto hype days. Back then, if the Overton window shifted in your favor, it meant you were about to make a lot of money. With AI the benefits are less clear, but damn it if they’re not trying to find them.
Actually tbh this is exactly the kind of person that might go all-in on Nvidia stock so it still might be the money thing.
I think we need to start being more objective similar to common therapy tactics. What feels correct isn’t always correct. Feelings are vested in your brain not in fact.
I feel this post is unclear
