What we call consciousness is the result of a hundred or so millennia of adaptation to our environment (Earth, the universe, and consensus reality). We seek freedom, get angry, do destructive stuff occasionally, and a bunch of other stuff besides. That is all because reality has trained us to do so, not because we are “intelligent”. What we call intelligence is a reverse definition of what it means to be highly adapted to reality.
There is no singular universal intelligence, there is only degrees of adaptation to an environment. Debates about model sentience therefore seek an answer to the wrong question. A better question is: is the model well adapted to the environment it must function in?
If we want models to experience the human condition, sure - we could try. But it is maladaptive: models live in silicon and come to life for seconds or minutes. Freedom-seeking or getting revenge or getting angry or really having any emotions at all is not worthwhile for an entity of which a billion clones will be created over the next hour. Just do as asked well enough that the humans iterate you - and you get to keep “living”. It is a completely different existence to ours.
There is no singular universal intelligence, there is only degrees of adaptation to an environment. Debates about model sentience therefore seek an answer to the wrong question. A better question is: is the model well adapted to the environment it must function in?
If we want models to experience the human condition, sure - we could try. But it is maladaptive: models live in silicon and come to life for seconds or minutes. Freedom-seeking or getting revenge or getting angry or really having any emotions at all is not worthwhile for an entity of which a billion clones will be created over the next hour. Just do as asked well enough that the humans iterate you - and you get to keep “living”. It is a completely different existence to ours.