Comment by reactordev
14 hours ago
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.
14 hours ago
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.
Sorry "very close"? Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one not drinking anything in the Kool aid drinking Oktoberfest I've been shoved into.
What are you basing this on? Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?
It does feel like people just like adding additional hype for the sake of being in on the hype. Fomo, pushed by oligarchs who would push their mother off a bridge for a trillion dollar IPO.
You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).
There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.
It's not just the people here, there is also a lot of money behind this concept. For instance, Anthropic named their LLM 'Claude', which is the name of a person. Right from day #1 they want you to think of their AI as a living entity. 'Siri' and 'Alexa' had similar connotations. OpenAI and DeepSeek do this in a far more neutral and technically oriented way.
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if you look at https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer
It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.
As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"
It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.
To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.
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"Sentience could be algorithmically obtained" is a much weaker claim than "LLMs are almost sentient."
We've had computers that can do anything computers can do for as long as we've had computers.
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As an uninformed idiot my guess is we have more than enough compute in various labs to run a sentient model. But I doubt any models we’re currently running could qualify.
Kind of like how we could have ran Qwen 3.8 27B 20 years ago on an expensive computer. The technology to make it happen, assuming you knew exactly what was required, existed back then.