And really there are two different concerns here.

One is liability over action that harm individuals or smaller populations like a company. There is no escape from that.

Then there is the second liability of creating something that escapes in the much more traditional sense. If I release a virus that kills 90% of humanity, a I'm liable, but it's a bit past that point now. Isn't it?

Instead it's about risk management and preventing labs from taking bets that have unlimited liability for everyone.

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estearum a day ago | parent [-]

But the latter has nothing to do with sentience, as your virus example makes clear.

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pixl97 a day ago | parent [-]

You're really splitting hairs emergent behaviors when the line doesn't exist sharply in real life. Anyone involved in more recent what is a virus vs what is a bacteria discussions realize there are a lot of lines that are fuzzy and exist all mixed up in some organisms.

Sentience in the end, is not really that important. Freedom of action in a model is. If it chooses to act like a virus it doesn't matter where that concept exists informationally, the fact it's a reachable and actionable concept is all that matters. An LLM with most of the knowledge we've ever created baked in has a lot of freedom of action.

	▲	estearum a day ago \| parent [-]
		As far as I can tell, we agree.