I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think it is possible we will have AGI, even ASI, long before we have sentience in AI. Of course, I'm a little skeptical of measures of sentience, so even if I'm right it will certainly be debatable.

I don't know. My point is that if there is some objective indicator that's correlated with sentience, LLMs are probably already close to us on it, maybe even beating us on it. And if, at some point, a ML model reaches our levels at every objective measure we can think of, then we'll have no choice but to grant it is intelligent/sentient/sapient.

But sentience itself involves self-reflection, which there is no evidence LLMs do at all. When you submkt a prompt, a giant mathematical operation happens, and when it is complete, it stops. ChatGPT is not sitting there thinking "oh man, I should have said..."

For humans, time does not stop - we constantly process both sensory information and our own thoughts, and even if you cut out external stimuli via e.g. sensory deprivation tank, the brain will just loop on its own output instead, of which you'll suddenly become much more aware.

Sentience is that internal loop you point out. LLMs (today) don't have that. When you prompt for "write a tagline for an ice cream shop", there is no identity that remembers other prompts about ice cream, or which reflects on how taglines have changed over time, or anything else. The results can be astoundingly good, even intelligent, but there's no sentience.

If you somehow turned off a person after each sentence, upon waking up to the next prompt their first thought would be "that was weird, I must have passed out", and we could use fMRI to track brain activity indicating that thought. We are even more capable of inspecting LLMs, and there is no equivalent activity. LLMs start and end with the tokens going in and out, and a huge matrix that transforms them.

I'm generally an open minded, probabilities-rather-than-certainties person, but I'd say the odds of LLMs having sentience that we can't detect are about the same as the odds of a television having sentience that we can't detect: as close to zero as we can measure.

Yes, but that is arguably a trivial limitation. Nothing stops you from running an LLM in a loop and feed it its own output. Plenty such experiments are probably going on already - it's a trivial loop (and a trivial way to burn through your wallet). The problem is, of course, context window being rather small. So it's possible - by no means certain, but I'm no longer dismissing this idea - that the capability for sentience is already there in GPT-4 structurally, and we just lack the ability to sustain it in a loop long enough to bring it into the open.

> If you somehow turned off a person after each sentence, upon waking up to the next prompt their first thought would be "that was weird, I must have passed out", and we could use fMRI to track brain activity indicating that thought.

That's not what I meant by LLM iteration. When I said that time stops, I mean that for LLM, it literally just stops. If you were to step-execute a human like that, they would never notice; it's not like the brain has a separate RTC module constantly feeding it with sub-second resolution timestamps (and if it did, we'd turn that off too). Over a hour or more, the human may realize their inner perception of time is increasingly lagging the wall clock, but to keep it comparable to LLM, we'd be iterating sub-second process.

In this hypothetical, there would be no extra activity in brains that isn't there in LLMs. Step-executing a human mind doesn't freeze some abstract subprocess, it freezes photons and electrons and chemical gradients.

On the other hand, sentience just means having an experience of observing the world, it doesn‘t even need to include a concept of self. Presumably at least all mammals have this, for sure a dog has this. ChatGPT - probably not.