OPENAI chief scientist says advanced AI may already be conscious
OpenAI's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever claimed this week that artificial intelligence (AI) may already be gaining consciousness.
On Wednesday, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever claimed on Twitter that 'it may be that today's largest neural networks are slightly conscious.'
He didn't name any specific developments, but is likely referring to the mega-scale neural networks, such as GPT-3, a 175 billion parameter language processing system built by OpenAI for translation, question answering, and filling in missing words.
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It is also unclear what 'slightly conscious' actually means, because the concept of consciousness in artificial intelligence is a controversial idea.
The widely accepted idea among AI researchers is that the tech has made great strides over the past decade, but still falls far short of human intelligence, nevermind being anywhere close to experiencing the world consciously, report The Byte.
It's possible that Sutskever was speaking facetiously, but it's also conceivable that as the top researcher at one of the foremost AI groups in the world, he's already looking downrange.
He's long been preoccupied with artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which would refer to AI that operates at a human or superhuman level. During his appearance in the iHuman AI documentary "iHuman," for instance, he even declared that that AGIs will "solve all the problems that we have today" before warning that they will also present "the potential to create infinitely stable dictatorships."
This tweet, however, marks the first time Sutskever, who cofounded OpenAI alongside Musk and the company's CEO Sam Altman in 2015, appears to have claimed that machine consciousness has already arrived.
Even stranger is the fact that OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit meant specifically to curb the existential risks sentient machines pose — before, in an eyebrow-raising twist, diving into research trying to bring powerful AI into existence.
An artificial neural network is a collection of connected units or nodes that model the neurons found within a biological brain, that can be trained to perform tasks and activities without human input - by learning, however, most experts say these systems aren't even close to human intelligence, let alone consciousness.
