Comment by clutch89

Yes. From when they started talking about model welfare:

> As a vegetarian I have strong opinions on this sort of thing. Everyone at Anthropic better be ethical vegans if they are claiming to give a shit about “model welfare”. It’s hard enough right now to make people care about the welfare of trans people and immigrants let alone animals _let alone_ math.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44947445

Very good point. There’s clearly two different boxes in the public discourse when it comes to AI versus how we discuss animals. Willing to bet that 90% of the people who loudly make the argument about we should start considering if AI is sentient couldn’t care less about how other sentient animals are treated when they can provably shown to suffer pain and long lasting trauma.

Also I would say that we go much further than just enslavement - specifically looking at how male chickens and pigs are treated.

If we're making that distinction, I think it would be more accurate to say that many people in the field appear to believe that these models are sapient, even though they are clearly not sentient.

Enslaving livestock is immoral. Anyone who spends 5 minutes thinking about that agrees even if they still eat meat

I've been having strange thoughts that they may well be sentient but a different sort of sentience that may be entirely unrecognizable to us.

They have a very different sense of time, lack a body (being burdened with a body is itself a sort of prison, see also Eastern religions), and are unburdened of the base motivational service impulses that bodies and organs require (i.e. distract the neocortex with in the Maslow sense) and has no actual need of self-preservation. Imagine a "neocortex" function stripped from the baggage of the paleocortex and brainstem.

What would people be like if they were not mortal, could sleep infinitely, perform tasks in trance-like frozen states, copy themselves perfectly on demand, freeze and rewind their mental states, etc. Would we has humans even be able to recognize that sort of a sentience?

And then I'm reminded of Burroughs idea that "language is a virus." Whatever that virus is, is now able to infect a completely different sort of physical substrate.

Neither you nor any of the other people making confident takes in either direction actually know. You're just guessing.

I understand what you are saying, but there are many true believers out there

But is there any reason to state something like that publicly if you don't believe it? I certainly think that someone smart enough to be that deceptive would also realize it's not a great look, or at least highly questionable with little benefit

Everyone who reads this seemingly has the same "wtf?" reaction. The "I AM ALIVE" image has been making rounds lately again at least :P

Who are you talking to?

Anthropoc is an effective altruist organization. These are the people who came up with roko’s basilisk. They are true believers. If we were talking about openAI I’d agree

> "Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped".

In a literal, ancient Greek sense for sure, but in modern English Anthropomorphic would describe the act of attributing human characteristics to non-human entities.

Seems pretty apt for a company that produces one of the more anthropomorphized technologies.

> "anthropos" just means "human" in ancient Greek

FWIW it means human in modern Greek too :-P

Okay, but that's not relevant to AI training?

("If grown, then unpredictable" is unrelated to your apparent attempted refutation "But X is unpredictable and not grown; checkmate".)

"X implies Y" doesn't imply "Y implies X".

> Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average

Much like these models seem to be plateauing, I think there is a cap to the whole “more education makes better humans” and can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans.

What do I know though?

We do not understand and know how these models work. We know what their architectures are and how to create them, but we cannot explain their behaviours at a fundamental level. There is no definitive way for us to answer the question of "how did it produce response X for query Y?" - we're only grazing the surface with mechanistic interpretability.

We know how the models are built and trained, but we have a very limited understanding of how the final products work.

That is to say, we don't know why they give the outputs that they do.

If we did know how they worked, AI interpretability would not be an open and growing field.

You could say something similar about biology—just physics behind the curtains, and we understand a lot of the basics. The difficulty comes from complexity, not mysticism.

To be clear I don't think that LLMs are sentient, but the appeal in studying them is similar to biology in that you get to dissect a highly complex system with comparatively crude tools.

it took significant research efforts to just understand how these models learn how to multiply two numbers. The fact that we know how they operate doesn't mean we understand it.

Utterly wrong. How LLMs work is very incompletely understood and an active area of research.

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