Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM"
Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness (2025) - "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".
Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (2023) - "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".
Chalmers, Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? (2023) - "within the next decade, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness".
Long, Sebo, Butlin, Birch et al., Taking AI Welfare Seriously (2024) - "there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future".
Dreksler, Caviola, Chalmers, Sebo et al., Subjective Experience in AI Systems: What Do AI Researchers and the Public Believe? (2025) - survey of 582 AI researchers; median estimate of 25% by 2034, and only 10% that such systems will never exist.
Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way.
A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".
Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too".
I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.
Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.
Naw - computers are really deterministic. It's hard to get them to behave otherwise.
As I understand it, if you turn down the temperature to 0 you get repeatable behavior - EXCEPT - on large servers with lots of users - the GPU can sometimes produce slightly different results based on batch size.
If computers were fully deterministic, we wouldn't need error correcting ram.
The abstracted design of the machine is meant to be deterministic, but you can't predict before running any command whether or not it will complete because there are externalities that effect the outcome.
Electromagnetic interference even happens in-chip where an electron can accidentally escape it's wire and enter another, possibly resulting in an error, but not every time.
It's even been used as an attack vector where rapidly flipping a bit increases the likelihood that a neighbor bit is also flipped, but the method is probabalistic, not deterministic.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness (2025) - "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".
Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (2023) - "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".
Chalmers, Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? (2023) - "within the next decade, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness".
Long, Sebo, Butlin, Birch et al., Taking AI Welfare Seriously (2024) - "there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future".
Dreksler, Caviola, Chalmers, Sebo et al., Subjective Experience in AI Systems: What Do AI Researchers and the Public Believe? (2025) - survey of 582 AI researchers; median estimate of 25% by 2034, and only 10% that such systems will never exist.
TacticalCoder · · focus · HN ↗
A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".
Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too".
I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.
Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.
antx · · focus · HN ↗
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
As I understand it, if you turn down the temperature to 0 you get repeatable behavior - EXCEPT - on large servers with lots of users - the GPU can sometimes produce slightly different results based on batch size.
goodmythical · · focus · HN ↗
The abstracted design of the machine is meant to be deterministic, but you can't predict before running any command whether or not it will complete because there are externalities that effect the outcome.
Electromagnetic interference even happens in-chip where an electron can accidentally escape it's wire and enter another, possibly resulting in an error, but not every time.
It's even been used as an attack vector where rapidly flipping a bit increases the likelihood that a neighbor bit is also flipped, but the method is probabalistic, not deterministic.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
budman1 · · focus · HN ↗
qarl · · focus · HN ↗