OpenAI Cofounder Mocked for Tweeting That Neural Networks Might Be Slightly Conscious

"It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious," OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever tweeted Wednesday. Futurism says that after republishing that remark, "the responses came rolling in, with some representing the expected handwringing about sentient artificial intelligence, but many others calling bull.""Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation back to the more realistic opportunities and threats posed by AI," UNSW Sidney AI researcher Toby Walsh chimed in.... Independent sociotechnologist Jurgen Geuter, who goes by the pseudonym "tante" online, quipped in response to Sutskever's tweet that "it may also be that this take has no basis in reality and is just a sales pitch to claim magical tech capabilities for a startup that runs very simple statistics, just a lot of them...." Leon Dercynski, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, ran with the same idea. "It may be that there's a teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere between Earth and Mars," he bantered. "This seems more reasonable than Ilya's musing, in fact, because the apparatus for orbit exists, and we have good definitions of teapots...." These critics, it should be noted, are not wrong to point out the outlandishness of Sutskever's claim - it was not only a departure for OpenAI and its chief scientist, but also a pretty unusual comment to make, given that up to this point, most who work in and study AI believe that we're many years away from creating conscious AI, if indeed we ever do. Sutskever, for his part, seems unbothered by the controversy. "Ego is (mostly) the enemy," he said Friday morning.

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