Back in the day, when somebody used to intimidate you with death (of you and humanity), we called him a blackmailer. Now thanks to capitalism, the role evolved into AI-company Representative!
Also I thought it was sentient for 3 years already.
Just unplug it bro
If everyone were to believe that a mob would show up and burn their data centers to the ground.
Maybe that’s what they want. Someone to save them from having to fulfill their promises while also allowing them to collect insurance on a increasingly unsound investment since datacenters now have a multi year waiting list in some places before they are allowed to be plugged into the grid.
Typical tech capitalist propaganda, I’m sure investors are eating that shit up
If AI if going to end me, please hurry up and do so, I’m tired of this bullshit
Oh. No. Whatever shall we do.
The correct answer is nothing. Fund your own shit, Anthropic.
they are aiming for the government to regulate it , so they can be the only one being funded, probably contracts.
They’d probably get more funding if they made up lies about how AI had gone rogue and is super horny and they need help researching why. It’s 2026. We are all prepared for the end. Give us something weird to look forward to.
Our product could kill everyone, please give us money to make it better at it’s job.
Dario Amodei is the WebMD of artificial intelligence.
Lol these guys are such bad liars. Because look, if his AI could do that, he would purchase catastrophic insurance for his own company. Right?
I don’t understand this weird game of AI companies saying their product will do the worst thing while asking people to give more money to them. But hey, apparently it works 🤷
1.They are trying to get regulations passed to cut the competition.
Only they will have the resources to make sure their AI is secure.
Can’t let anyone else run any AI.
- They want to pretend the AI has its own motivations and so it’s not on them when it’s used to blackmail or hack people/organizations.
Look how powerful it is. You want power right? Here’s the greatest power ever invented and it could be yours! But wait! There’s more! You could end the human race! Call now! Operators are standing by.
Bullshit. If they have operators their AI must suck!
Ever hear of people investing in weapons manufacturers?
Not remotely the same lol. Human beings have been fighting each other since there were more than two people. That is never going to stop, which makes weapons profitable.
When a company is telling you their product might go rogue and kill all humanity, that kinda puts an upper bound on being profitable
Dunno, we’ve been making nukes like crazy even since the whole nuclear winter thing was figured out.
Sure, but those companies are selling war that is profitable. AI companies are selling the end of the world.
Like a collection of nuclear warheads that can end the world, but if it’s your collection of nukes you can threaten others with it.
Sure, kid. You’ve got a great imagination
I bet the fossil fuel giants feel like absolute idiots now for not leading with “our products could endanger all life on the planet and best case probably doom Humanity to a new longer dark ages”.
become sentient
Absolutely not. The large language model chatbots use is not a path to sentience.
The rest of it, sure. If someone prompts it to.
These AI companies pushing the sentience angle are not doing so by accident.
The concept of sentient AI is something people have been conditioned for for years, through popular media. It’s publicity that cannot be bought, whether it’s true or not. Users believing it probably drives engagement.
They’ll mention it every time, because it makes headlines.
Two truths and a lie.
The damage can be caused quite unintentionally as the AI single-mindedly pursues its goal; sentience is not required.
See the paperclip thought experiment.
The paperclip scenario requires an AI capable of reasoning - LLMs are nowhere near that.
LLM’s don’t operate in a vacuum anymore. They’re given tools and access to systems.
An LLM could for sure shut down a database if you ask it to reduce costs and you give it database management tools. That’s getting closer to the paperclip situation.
If you give it access it’s at least partly on you.
Unfortunately, we’ve written a lot about the paperclip scenario, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the training data
…still not how this works. The model itself would need reasoning capability. The ability to regurgitate the story does not make it capable of taking the necessary actions.
Not if we connect it to a bunch of systems that take its regurgitations as instructions
Find me an example of a system that can translate “make this steel mill produce paperclips” into actions. I’ll wait.
A computer automated system doesn’t currently exist, obviously. That would be reckless and pointless, so thankfully, nobody’s seen a reason to implement it.
I just know techbros and similar will want to build and connect LLMs to systems like that as soon as they think they can get away with it.
The large language model chatbots use is not a path to sentience.
We don’t know that and won’t know that until there are sentient machines.
We don’t know that in the same way we don’t know the Kool-Aid Man won’t burst through the wall at any given moment and start singing Freebird. Technically the chances aren’t 0, but they may as well be.
What is your area of expertise that makes you so certain about how sentience can be attained?
I am a software engineer. I deal with LLMs and their implementation every day. I’m not a specialist, but I have a good enough idea of how they work. Their core functionality is fundamentally no different than the predictive text function on your phone. Even setting aside the fact that sentience is a complex and ill-defined concept, certainly you can agree that your autocorrect is nowhere in the realm of sentient.
Not the OP, but any software developer who has spent some time with the inner workings of LLMs can tell you that. Open weight models are a good opportunity to explore how LLMs work on the inside and to experiment with them a lot more than you can do with the so called Frontier models. The technology however is the same. These are just very fancy statistical prediction machines, and the reason why you are so impressed with them is that the statistical average of what sounds reasonable in a conversation is exactly what people expect to hear on average, given a specific context. It’s a neat little trick that works only only as long as the context fits (contentwise and spacewise), and once you realize that you’ll see LLMs as what they truly are. There is no magic, and the “intelligence” is the intelligence of the people who built those systems, the systems themselves are not intelligent in any commonly used sense of the word.
LLMs are simply a statistics model, nothing more, nothing less
Sure, when you engage in reductionism, you can say the same thing about our brains.
You could yes, you’d be wrong, but you could say that.
No you can’t you dumbass.
Reductionism is the tendency to make inappropriate reductions. This is a perfectly appropriate reduction.
The problem is that despite being a literally true statement, it relies on the implicit assumption that a system founded in statistics necessarily has limitations that preclude sentience (can generalize this to other capabilities, the same argument is often used), when whether that is the case is the entire question at issue. It’s totally meaningless if someone just feels intuitively that this must be true, that’s not a real argument.
Worse, it gestures at an idea that is demonstrably false, that this technology is equivalent in all important ways to processing inputs through a math function someone wrote, when the whole innovation here is that the training process produces novel mechanisms for solving the given problem, mechanisms no one specifically intended or predicted, or in most cases even understands. And those mechanisms can do some seriously impressive things that were previously impossible.
A good argument here would at minimum need to actually explain why this is insufficient.
The problem is that despite being a literally true statement, it relies on the implicit assumption that a system founded in statistics necessarily has limitations that preclude sentience
Nope. We do not assume any system can produce sentience just by being complex. We have no reason to begin with that assumption so there’s no assumption to be made in dismissing it.
I am not making the claim that it can produce sentience (personally I don’t see sentience as a very meaningful concept anyway), I’m saying the arguments being made here that it cannot are deficient. Reminder of the context: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/77644247/28876812
Are whales sentient? Apes? Dogs? Squid? Alligators? Spiders? Fleas? What’s the test? (Yeah, the mirror test - how well do you think that really works?)
H. sapiens has more in common with fleas than LLMs - the LLMs only seem more familiar because they’re trained on our text-based interactions. Whatever sentience LLMs do or do not develop, we will be debating how to define it probably until they start reproducing themselves and force us to a sit-down negotiation over how we will divide the Earth’s resources - or maybe they won’t bother with negotiation.
So, there’s a difference between sentience and sapience, being self aware, or having consciousness.
Sentient just means the ability to experience feelings.
Pretty much all the animals you mentioned are indeed sentient.
LLMs are not conscious or self aware. They don’t have the ability to feel, so they’re not sentient. There’s an argument that they’re reaching sapience or wisdom, which is the ability to apply experience and tacit knowledge to new situations and complex questions.
Which is the issue. They can become sapient before sentient, meaning they can apply experience to new situations without the ability to use feeling as part of that. That’s pretty much the science fiction AI nightmare. A cold, unemotional, unfeeling computer that can apply logic and experience to problems.
complex questions
Yet another slippery fish to try to wrestle with bare hands. What constitutes complexity? Some relatively simple looking questions turn out to be highly complex: Are there any whole-number solutions to (a^n + b^n = c^n) if (n) is greater than 2?
Then, any number of complex looking questions turn out to be quite simple with a little insight: such as any large product which has a factor that reduces to 0.
What’s simple for some people is hard for others, and I would posit that is greatly amplified when you stop comparing humans to humans and start comparing humans to animals or machines…
they can apply experience to new situations without the ability to use feeling as part of that.
We put unfeeling psychopaths in charge of our largest corporations, to maximize profits - a machine might be less scary in the long run.
Well, that’s not really a philosophical question. Simple questions are ones that only deal with one question at a time and have single answers.
Complex question involve multiple implicit questions and require inference to answer and there are multiple possible correct answers.
“Are there any whole-number solutions to (a^n + b^n =c^n) where n>2” isn’t complex. That’s actually extremely easy to answer. You could just keep brute forcing through every whole number in known existence if you had the compute power. Like trying to find the next digit of pi. But that’s not Fermat’s last theorem. The actual problem is “there are no whole-number solutions to (a^n + b^n =c^n) where n>2, prove it“ which is much more complex because it requires answering multiple questions along the way. The implicit questions that arise are simple “why” questions that have to be answered.
The answer to your question is “no”. But then the follow is “well why”. Wrapping it all up in a nice equation that explains all the “well why” questions before they’re even asked is the complex part.
AI is already getting to that point. LLMs are not synonymous with AI. They’re a type of AI but there are far more models out there than just LLMs. They’re just a subset of generative AI.
“Easy” and “hard” are NOT the same thing as “simple” and “complex”.
that’s not really a philosophical question
Choose your field… two rabbis (dirty old men, of course) having agreed that abortion is a sin: debating whether it is a sin for a woman to perform feminine hygeine after rape to possibly prevent pregnancy from that rape. Where on the continuum from Monty Python’s “every sin is sacred” up to late term does abortion become a sin? Do the circumstances of the insemination come into play or not, and if so… how? What considerations are given to alienating the woman and perhaps her family from the synagogue if too hard-line of an interpretation is taught? Should the considerations be drawn up mathematically with weights and formulas if possible? Like physics, if you have a formula you can check it for correctness by putting in test values and seeing if the results are reasonable.
“Easy” and “hard” are NOT the same thing as “simple” and “complex”.
No, but they rhyme - so to speak. Hard problems become easier when their apparent complexities are simplified.
Well that first one is very much a complex question with no correct answer, that also requires sentience, not just sapience. Those are the questions where the disconnect becomes dangerous, because now you bring in morals, and moral questions are by definition emotional. There’s no such thing as a concrete standard of morals.
The rabbis agree that abortion is sin. Do they agree that preventing pregnancy from the start counts as abortion? Given that they’re rabbis, the answer would probably be no, because even the most Orthodox Jews believe women are allowed contraception.
But that’s not really an answer to the real question, because the real question of when does abortion become a sin requires answering the next question of when does it become abortion and not prevention? Is it the Catholic view where preventing a pregnancy is the same as abortion, the biological point where it becomes a living organism with its own DNA, or the medical view where it becomes a pregnancy when it reaches the implantation stage?
Again, that’s not a philosophical issue. That question is complex because it requires answering MANY other questions along the way to reach a final answer to the original question. It’s an extremely complex question because each of those questions that arise also have a million questions to answer to get the answer to them. And all of them being “right” or “wrong” rely on large scale social acceptance of the answers to each other questions, as well as the ultimate question of if there is even such a thing as a concrete “right” or “wrong” answer to any ethical question.
Those answers are always based on emotion. All moral and ethical questions are based on emotion because morals and ethics are emotional constructs.
That’s where AI fails. AI doesn’t have sentience. It can’t feel emotion and therefore can’t reason using emotion. It can only go by what it is trained on as concretes.
And, kinda? They kinda rhyme. There are PLENTY of things that are simple but hard, and plenty of things that are complex but easy. Like losing weight. Losing weight is extremely simple. It’s basic thermodynamics. Consume less energy than you expend, and you lose weight. Period. No exception. Now that can be extremely HARD for most people to actually do. Tying your shoes is relatively complex. It’s multiple steps that all depend on the previous step being completed properly. But it’s easy enough to do that most people can master it by the time they’re 8.
> The large language model chatbots use is not a path to sentience.
We don’t know that and won’t know that until there are sentient machines.
You’re right, in the sense that we wouldn’t know what is a path to sapience until it happens, but we can only work with what we know, and what we do know is that the transformer framework language models use is not what a brain is, and a brain is, as far as we know, the only path. The artificial neural network technology transformers are based on is rooted on a mathematical representation of an extremely simplified model of how neurons work. Human minds don’t work in tokens, and brains have chemical signals and things that also have an impact. The physical wiring is part of the story.
We’d need to objectively define what sentience/sapience is to begin with, anyway. We can’t even do that for people and animals, expanding it to machines seems an exercise in futility. It wasn’t that long ago that babies and animals were considered to be little more than automata as far as consciousness goes.
It would be amazing to be proven wrong, because the implications for philosophy and neurology would be staggering, but I digress.
Can’t wait for it to try to blackmail me lol! Then I can pay another one to undo the spell! Another subscription!
Just one more trillion bro, come on bro, it’s sentient bro!
Hmm well now I want to invest trillions of dollars into it!
I hate this shit so much.
I was promised that the cyberpunk dystopia would at least look cool. What a letdown.
We don’t even get cool robot arms or genetically engineered cat girls.
“Sheeeeeeit, I thought she said silicon implants… Well, at least she jiggles I guess”
if we had braindances at least, we could ignore real life. But nope, best we can do is crack.
I know, right? Where’s my double jump module, already?
I remember watching a video of somebody calculating how much force a second jump in air requires and it doesn’t end well for anyone nearby.
Don’t go to the ripperdocs the Maelstrom suggest…
