Chief AI Scientist Says Some Bots May Have Started Becoming Sentient

With all the developments as of late, it’s no wonder that people tend to have the concern of a sci-fi-movie-esque scenario, involving a sentient computer turned against humans, happening. 

OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever hasn’t made this any easier with a tweet stating that current “large neural networks” may already have lives of their own. Although he didn’t say it was a definite fact, it’s still a little unnerving.

it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious

— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) February 9, 2022

It also contradicts the beliefs of many researchers who have stated that although “intelligence” is in the AI name, the machines do not yet possess the same capabilities and nuances that humans do, and it’ll be some time before it reaches that stage. 

Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI alongside Elon Musk and CEO Sam Altmman in 2015, has been focusing on artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is often used to refer to AI operating at a human level. 

This rings of Tesla’s humanoid bots, revealed by Musk late last year and said to have the potential to develop their own “unique personalities.” 

Interestingly, as Futurism reports, the company was first founded in an attempt to lessen the risks of sentient machines, like those nightmarish scenarios that occur in movies. But now, it’s focusing on researching ways to bring AI to more intelligent and powerful levels than ever before—what seems to be the total opposite.

After Sutskever dropped this bombshell of a tweet, he didn’t clarify anything else, leaving everyone in the slightly-unnerved dark. At the time of writing, it’s still the most recent post on his profile. 

There are still the UNESCO guidelines for ethical AI—for now, at least. But at the same time, we can’t say that AI itself never warned us. 

[via Futurism, image ID 70038925 © Dmytro Zinkevych | Dreamstime.com]