It's not your main point, but I can't help but point out that artificial diamonds ARE diamonds. Cubic zirconia is a different mineral. Usually the distinction is "natural" vs "lab grown" diamonds.

When computers have super-human level intelligence, we might be making similar distinctions. Intelligence IS intelligence, whether it's from a machine or an organism. LLMs might not get us there but something machine will eventually.

> I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.

I haven't met him, but a famous (pre-ChatGPT) counterexample is Blake Lemoine:

> In June 2022, LaMDA gained widespread attention when Google engineer Blake Lemoine made claims that the chatbot had become sentient. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA).

It's also not uncommon here to see someone respond to a comment questioning the consciousness or sentience of LLMs with the question along the lines of "how do you know anyone is conscious/sentient?" They're not being direct with their beliefs (I believe as a kind of motte and bailey tactic), but the implication is they think LLM are sentient and bristle when someone suggests otherwise.

Interesting. Artificial does have a negative connotation to it, I never considered that.

Synthetic sounds more neutral, aside from bringing microplastics to my mind.

I guess the field of artificial life has the same issue.

As another comment pointed out, you don't necessarily need consciousness for intelligence. And you don't need either of those for goal oriented behavior.

My favorite example is the humble refrigerator. (The old one, without the microchips!) It has a goal (target temperature), it senses its environment (current temperature), and takes action based on that (turn cooling on or off).

A cuter example is the dandelion seed. It "wants" to fly. Obviously! So you can display goal directed behavior as the result of natural forces moving through you. (Arguably electricity and glucose also fall in that category, but... Yeah...)

LLMs, conscious or not, moved into that category this year, in a big way. (e.g. Opus and Codex routinely bypassing security restrictions in the pursuit of the goal.)

Does it really have goals, or does it merely appear to act as though it has them? Does it appear to act as though it has consciousness?

(I forget who said it: it won't really disrupt the global economic system, it will merely appear to do so ;)

Also, here I am! :)

> LLMs will become sentient or conscious

I've always doubted it, but then again I've also been skeptical about claims that humans have these capabilities.

>LLMs will become sentient or conscious.

People who declare that AGI is coming.

> But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.

I saw someone on the news claiming this recently, but he ran an AI consultancy firm so I suspect he was trying to drum up business.

What? Nobody says cubic zirconia is an artificial diamond, it’s just a different shiny crystal. We have loads of actual artificial diamonds, so cheap you can get a cutting disc made fr9m them for $10 at home depot.

And nobody working in the space either as ML/AI practitioners, or as philosophers, or as cognitive scientists, even thinks we know what consciousness is, or what is required to create it. So there would be no way to tell if an AI is conscious because we haven’t yet managed to reliably tell if humans, or dogs, or chimpanzees or whales are conscious.

The claim that is often made is that more work on the current generation of AI tech will lead to AGI at a human or better level. I agree with Yann Lecun that this is unlikely.