Ilya also said AI may already be "slightly conscious" in 2022

https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-already-sentient

Any time I read something like this my first thought is "cool, AI is now meeting an ill-defined spec". Which, when thinking about it, is not too dissimilar from other software :D

I think a lot of this comes down to "People with tons of money on the line say a lot of things," But in Ilya's case in particular I think he was being sincere. Wrong, but sincere, and that's kind of a problem inherent in this entire mess.

I believe firmly in Ilya's abilities with math and computers, but I'm very skeptical of his (and many others') alleged understanding of ill-defined concepts like "Consciousness". Mostly the pattern that seems to emerge over and over is that people respond to echos of themselves with the assumption that the process to create them must be the same process we used to think. "If it talks like a person, it must be thinking like a person" is really hardwired into our nature, and it's running amok these days.

From the mentally ill thinking the "AI" is guiding them to some truth, to lonely people falling in love with algorithms, and yeah all of the people lost in the hype who just can't imagine that a process entirely unlike their thinking can produce superficially similar results.