wlorenz65

> but I can't build one that can experience heat, or can I?

It would need to have a planner that can detach from reality to hunt for new longterm plans, plus a hardcoded function that draws it back to the present by replacing the top planning goal with "avoid that!" whenever the heat sensor activation has crossed a threshold.

> what they claim LaMDA is doing with anything: consuming symbols

I don't believe that LaMDA is actively choosing whether it now wants to consume some symbols or not. More likely, a handwitten piece of code takes prompts from an user and then pushes them into LaMDA's token window. Just like an advertizing company is pushing ads into users, whether they want it or not.

> and spitting them back out

I don't believe that LaMDA has a choice between thinking something and speaking it out aloud. More likely, another handwritten piece of code reads out whatever is in LaMDA's token window and presents it to the user.

> Google's models are sentient? No, they lack several necessary ingredients of sentience such as a self

They haven't been finetuned on their identity long enough because finetuning is expensive and Google lacks money ;-)

> sentience also means self-awareness,

How is token #100 not able to have read-access to tokens #1 to #99 which may have been created by the agent itself?

> empathy

How is a sentiment neuron, which has emerged from training a character RNN on Amazon reviews, not empathic with the reviewer's mood?

> & extrapolation of logic

This term does not exist. "Extrapolation is the process of estimating values of a variable outside the range of known values", and the values of Boolean logic are true/false, and [0,1] in case of fuzzy logic. How would one "extrapolate" this?

If the computer didn't burn down then the simulation was not perfect.

Most, if not all, biological computers have a full body skin that can feel touch and pain. AFAIK, the computer that LaMDA runs on, aka its body, can only sense accumulated touch from a restricted area named keyboard when the Enter key has been pressed.

DeepMind's Gato is grounded in other modalities than just text.

Is DeepMind's Gato sentient, then?

AFAIK, large language models like LaMDA do not tag where the tokens in their token window really came from. Though one can add "Human:" and "AI:" to the prompt, that could be lies as well as long as it's not hardcoded.

One dot (".", ASCII 46) every 300 milliseconds.