As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of topics.
To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so.
You should check out the WaPo article that originally published his concerns. He frequently makes many errors audibly with a reporter who is trying rather hard to see his point of view. I’m not trying to be rude, but he came off like kind of a sucker that would fall for a lot of scammer tactics. There were usually some form of strangeness such as him deciding when the content limit of the conversation began and ended. Further, he asks only leading questions, which would be fine if transformers didn’t specifically train to output the maximum likelihood text tokens from the distribution of their training set, which was internet text created by humans.
He was frequently cited as an engineer but I don’t think he actually had a strong background in engineering but rather in philosophy.
To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and sentience—and what it takes for them to emerge—as the experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made me more so.
I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0>