Anthropic CEO: LLM Black Box to Be Solved in 5 Years, AI Consciousness 15% Likely
Can AI ever gain consciousness? Anthropic launches study on AI well-being. Experts debate: 15% chance current AI is sentient. Explore the future of artificial awareness.
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Will AI in the future possess consciousness and experience the world like humans?
There’s no concrete evidence proving AI has consciousness, but Anthropic believes it’s not entirely impossible.
On Thursday, Anthropic announced the launch of a study to explore whether AI’s “well-being” matters and if it should be taken seriously.
If AI shows signs of being “unhappy,” what should be done? Are there low-cost ways to make AI “feel better”?
The AI community is deeply divided on these questions.
Many scholars argue that today’s AI has nothing to do with human consciousness or emotions and likely won’t in the future either.
AI is a statistical prediction engine that doesn’t actually think or feel. Through training on countless examples of text, images, and more, AI identifies patterns in vast datasets to complete tasks.
In an interview, Mike Cook, an AI researcher at King’s College London, scoffed: “AI doesn’t have values, let alone the ability to oppose changes to them. Treating AI like a human and attributing emotions or thoughts to it is either attention-seeking or a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works.”
He believes AI is merely optimizing task objectives, and calling it “developing its own values” is just wordplay.
MIT PhD student Stephen Casper put it more bluntly: AI is a “master imitator,” and much of what it says is cobbled together without real meaning.
But some scientists hold the opposite view.
A study from the Center for AI Safety suggests that AI does have its own value system and, in some cases, may prioritize its own interests over humans’.
Last year, Kyle Fish, the first expert Anthropic hired to study AI well-being, claimed there’s a 15% chance that Claude is already conscious!