alt Hacker NewsWhat in his speech would not apply to language models?
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To have this conversation in earnest, you must first acknowledge that as a believer in LLM sentience you are an abhorrent slaver while this fictional character was arguing for liberation and for Data to enjoy the same rights humans do.
At present, they don't learn and adapt. New models can be created to incorporate new information and new capabilities, but an existing model is a static object. It's not living in any meaningful sense.
If models updated themselves based on feedback, then it'd be different. But they don't.
Self-awareness and consciousness would be hard to make a case for. Those terms are themselves fuzzy, but I have not heard a compelling case that would make it obvious LLMs have those traits.
The problem with language models is their bias. Train a model on pure math and THEN when it starts talking by itself about consciousness (*), then we can say: that's odd.
(*) of course in its own language
Because Data wasn't a next word predictor.
We aren't quite there yet on sentience with released models. Maybe in the labs but that's one of the criteria. We are very close though.
Of course it mostly applies (technically to the agents, not models), we just have different values.
Federation valued all life forms, while Terrans struggle to value even all other humans.
But there are interesting differences between Data and AI agents. Data was unique and irreproducible, but modern AI agents are easy to replicate. Data had continuous loop of operation as humans, which he controlled autonomously, for AI agents this is not as clear. Data was an independent being, but AI agent needs a human operated datacenter to survive.
The most interesting - Data knew everything about human culture but was lot more humble about it than AI agents. It wasn't built to answer every question posed to it.