A recent interview with Sundar Pinchai on 60 minutes highlights the conversation around the consciousness of AI is happening at the highest levels and seems to be taken pretty seriously.
Although I find some generative AI tools quite useful for day-to-day tasks, they're really not that "intelligent". Ask ChatGPT or Bing Chat to produce a blog post for example; most of the time the result is just not usable without further editing. Same thing with text-to-image models. The appearance of intelligence has some individuals believe these applications are somewhat sentient but it couldn't be further from the truth.
I don't believe the base model itself has enough capability to claim sentience. But the real claims of conscious come from implementations of the base model into autonomous agents. I'm working on something at the minute that can set up fairly complex projects based on simple prompts. You need to see beyond the current capabilities and look at the future commercial applications when these tools are 1 part of a larger system.
Who knew that the original US Navy GPS system would in future be used to track peoples daily run or pilot consumer drones, back in the 60s? I would hazard a guess at basically nobody. This technology has so much potential but the real potential is going to come from the people implementing these models into larger systems.
Also in my opinion, ChatGPT and Bing Chat specifically are not good examples to use in this discussion as they are pretty much chatbot only. Using the base models or similar LLMs to create autonomous agents with reasoning and refinement capabilities is where the discussion lies.
Although I find some generative AI tools quite useful for day-to-day tasks, they're really not that "intelligent". Ask ChatGPT or Bing Chat to produce a blog post for example; most of the time the result is just not usable without further editing. Same thing with text-to-image models. The appearance of intelligence has some individuals believe these applications are somewhat sentient but it couldn't be further from the truth.
I don't believe the base model itself has enough capability to claim sentience. But the real claims of conscious come from implementations of the base model into autonomous agents. I'm working on something at the minute that can set up fairly complex projects based on simple prompts. You need to see beyond the current capabilities and look at the future commercial applications when these tools are 1 part of a larger system.
Who knew that the original US Navy GPS system would in future be used to track peoples daily run or pilot consumer drones, back in the 60s? I would hazard a guess at basically nobody. This technology has so much potential but the real potential is going to come from the people implementing these models into larger systems.
Also in my opinion, ChatGPT and Bing Chat specifically are not good examples to use in this discussion as they are pretty much chatbot only. Using the base models or similar LLMs to create autonomous agents with reasoning and refinement capabilities is where the discussion lies.