Comment by dimator
13 hours ago
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.
Well, when you name your company "Anthropic", what do you expect? I remain surprised that this continues to get a free pass.
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.
This isn't an argument to say that algorithms must be capable of consciousness, or that all Consciousness must be algorithms. It is an argument to show the consequence of declaring that LLMs are not capable of consciousness is to claim no computer is.
"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.
The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.
I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.
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