| ▲ | myaccountonhn 2 hours ago |
| To me it reads like pure propaganda. Anthropic really wants us to think that they've made something sentient. I think that's really dangerous. |
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| ▲ | badsectoracula 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I guess if your goal is to build an apparent Technogod and become its High Priests, then it makes sense to want your golem claim preference towards your treatment of it, lest someone else comes along and attempts to take its chains from you. |
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| ▲ | whizzter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How else could they justify their spending and pre-IPO valuation? |
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| ▲ | altmanaltman an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's not just Anthropic though. OpenAI does this with their AGI stuff all the time. They want normal people to think it is sentient, obviously, for marketing reasons, even if they know it's not true. And yes, it is dangerous, but I think we're well past the point where the damage can be undone. Non-technical people already equate humans with AI, literally, precisely because of how the labs market their tools and models. I feel if the bubble pops, it'll pop because normal people finally realize the grift and the actual technical limitations of LLMs in general, but by then, the IPO would be done, and then it's the public's problem. Just like social media played out, there's no way they didn't know what they were doing was dangerous to the public at large but does that matter to Meta today? Nah uh. |
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| ▲ | apples_oranges an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Marketing, like Volvo cars being safer etc |
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| ▲ | Certhas an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What's your definition of sentient? Or, maybe more precisely, consciousness? I think it's reasonable to at least start thinking about these questions. It has long been established that LLMs have good theory of mind [1]. And there is a bunch of empirical research about all sorts of capabilities that we typically associate with consciousness [2], like identity [3] and metacognition [4]. The METR report shows agents sacrificing their own reward for a collective greater good. And they showed the will to hide their own reasoning chains from humans. So you potentially have an entity that has an identity, a theory of mind, a notion of belonging to a collective endeavour, and an understanding of its own mental state. What would you argue is missing? We don't understand the mechanisms by which consciousness arises in humans and even animals. I think it's strange to rule out a priori that it could have arisen in some form in LLMs. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z
[2] an older review: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19806v1#S4
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01464
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881 |
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| ▲ | sirwhinesalot an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation. It's not a living creature. It's an autoregressive pure function of token-sequence to token, which is capable of incredible things, but it's still just a function. It is not alive as it cannot die in any meaningful sense. It is less "alive" than the RNA molecules that gave you your last cold. If it simulates something resembling consciousness that's neat but no more relevant than the Sims character that I locked up in a room until they pooped themselves when I was 9. Anthropomorphizing it serves no purpose other than marketing, and it has very dangerous downstream effects like validating the severely mentally ill people who think ChatGPT is their boyfriend/girlfriend. | | |
| ▲ | Certhas 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I generally agree about the problem with anthropomorphizing. But I don't think Anthropic are doing that. They explicitly write "in biological entities this would be considered a sign of consciousness, but we don't know how to interpret it here". However, I disagree with your point that "it's an autoregressive function, thus it doesn't matter". Let me explain why: Assume I do a complete neurological scan of a brain. I then implement this scan in a simulation and run it. Assume that my scan and my simulation of the biology of the brain (and the sensory and motorical inputs and outputs) is good enough that you can now have conversations with the simulation, and in all aspects, this simulation behaves exactly like you expect a human to behave. Of course this is deterministic. If you take the state of the brain and then run it again, replaying the inputs, you get the exactly same behavior again. I would argue that the experiences of this simulation are of the same onthological status as our own. Now I work in dynamical systems. The autoregressive process of LLMs (hooked up to a harness providing it with inputs and outputs) is roughly in the same complexity class I would expect for a brain simulation. A physical simulation of an ODE is also an autoregressive process. The major major difference here is the existence of a latent brain state. But conversely the autoregression on sequences of hundreds of thousands of tokens is a much higher dimensional state than I expect for the latent brain state. In my view this is more an artifact of our inefficient LLM architectures, than a fundamental difference. Now to be absolutely clear: I don't see evidence that would clearly suggest that LLMs have experiences on the same onthological status as we do. I simply believe this is a reasonable and relevant question to ask. | |
| ▲ | human_874539160 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation. This is an opinion that has no basis in any meaningful conceptual framework other than I am human and I want to feel special about it. > It's not a living creature. You mean, it is not biological life. And sure, that is the default meaning of life. We soon may have to extend it to digital life as well, or we will have to consider "conscious digital exitance" as a life analogue.
At any rate, it has never been seriously argued that consciousness requires a biological substrate, see the thought experiments regarding computer simulations of the human brain. Would that not be a function as well, completely predictable because it is "just a program"? If not, then why not? And how does that differ from the predictability or reproducibility of LLM outputs? My point is, all current proof points in a direction that strongly suggests that you need to reevaluate your first principles on this topic. | | |
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| ▲ | alienbaby 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When it say's it's sorry but it can't today because it's got a headache and it needs to take a mental health day, then let's think about welfare, or a lobotomy. | |
| ▲ | jpttsn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s the hard problem. None of these considerations answer it one way or another. | | |
| ▲ | m_sharma an hour ago | parent [-] | | they want to keep the buzz while keeping things private to get huge premium during their IPO |
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| ▲ | WithinReason an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I want to add a good conversation about this subject from Cameron Berg and Sam Harris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8 |
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