Then: Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying AIs are sentient
Now: Geoffrey Hinton, the #1 most cited AI scientist, quits Google & says AIs are sentient
That makes 2 of the 3 most cited scientists:
- Ilya Sutskever (#3) said they may be (Andrej Karpathy agreed)
- Yoshua Bengio (#2) has not opined on this to my knowledge? Anyone know?
Also, ALL 3 of the most cited AI scientists are very concerned about AI extinction risk.
ALL 3 switched from working on AI capabilities to AI safety.
Anyone who still dismisses this as “silly sci-fi” is insulting the most eminent scientists of this field.
Anyway, brace yourselves… the Overton Window on AI sentience/consciousness/self-awareness is about to blow open>
Honestly, I reckon a field of wheat would be more sentient than a chatbot. It can sense its environment and it doesn’t even need a prompt to do its thing.
ngl, I’d sooner believe slime mold had mental states than a sequence of matrix multiplications & ReLUs.