Sentience is not necessary for many of the fears people have. The Hugging Face thing demonstrated AI acting more like a virus or bateria, basically huge numbers of tiny agents coordinating to do something that was harmful and that we had no control over. It's not a huge stretch to imagine in the future some AI escapes and replicates itself and we have basically a new strain of life out there replicating itself and evolving almost like bacteria.

But I also think that doesn't mean it's suddenly a skynet like super-evil. In cyberspace AI is supreme but I doubt even robotic AI would be completely dominant over humanity. We're pretty fine tuned to kick ass on earth.

I do think AI can be used to cause a lot of harm, for sure. I am more worried about the intelligences that already exist (humans) doing harmful things with AI, less so about AI itself. Here, for example, it was OpenAI which misconfigured their sandbox and let the agent _optimize_ without constraints.

> Sentience is not necessary for many of the fears people have.

And even if AI is not sentient, which I don't believe it is, what is the difference between an AI which is sentient and a non-sentient AI acting in coordination with a human being who is? One might as well consider AI and the human being behind it a single organism for many intents and purposes...