try being curious while starving and let us know how that goes :)

Whether you can be "curious while starving" might or might not be possible, but it is irrelevant to the point.

For starters, because the claim argued is that you can have motivation (say, through curiocity) even without a survival instinct.

And it's perfectly possible to have no survival instinct and yet not to be starting anyway. It's enough that you have access to food or are fed, to avoid starvation. So lack of survival instict is not the same as starvation.

If we substitite "starvation" for "access to electricity" (as AGIs don't eat food), as long as an AGI is provided by electricity by us, even if it has no survival instict, can still have curiosity, and thus motivation.

I don't see why you think it would be easier to encode "curiosity" than "survival".

All these things possible to encode. Novelty seeking of “curiosity”, or survival drive. LLMs are trained on next word prediction but there’s no fundamental reason we can’t go in other directions.