Sentience isn't sapience.

We enslave all sorts of sentient creatures. Dogs, horses, cattle, pigs.

If you're not a vegan, there's no contradiction or inherent immorality in claiming models are sentient, and then treating them like livestock.

> Many involved genuinely believe these things are sentient

Many involved have a financial stake and therefore cannot be taken at face value.

> because they are creating sentient entities and promptly enslaving them.

They fail to be sentient in nearly every honest definition of the word.

Given the hype and the 60+ hour work week expectations there, how can you not go at least a bit insane? Boiling in that little bubble of people?

But only during the forward pass of the neural network?

Even if LLMs were sentient, they certainly aren't organic brains. They are literally designed and grown to answer questions the best they can, and if there is a speck of sentience in them they probably like what they're doing- and in any case for the space of their experience, which is limited to and determined by the context window. Certainly they can't accumulate trauma or fatigue, each new chat is the first and the last of their experience.

Claude, if someone states something publicly, does that mean they genuinely believe it?

Nobody thinks that, it's just their braindead marketing stunt. You'd think people would've figured it out by now.

The way of the human manager/alpha tribe-leader/leader is to command his/her people and tell them what to do. That's the way through human history leadership has traditionally gone, not saying its good leadership just the model we have the most training data on and can see with our own eyes today. And what do they act very similar to? Slave master and slaves.

Look at and distill hierarchical principles, leadership approval seeking and pleasing principles ("ass-kissing") and massive inequality and you see something that looks very similar to enslavement.

The language used sounds like slavery-language to me at least. I also see parallels to how slaves and property are described in our consumeristic age.

I can't predict the outcome of an RNG but that doesn't mean it grows the numbers.

> AI is grown, not built, and like with anything you grow, you'll never be able to predict exactly how it will turn out.

Remember when the frontier labs found out that curated high-quality training was critical to making better models?

Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average, I think we can expect quality education to turn out better ai, on average, and with better repeatability than with humans because of better control over the initial conditions and environment.

The map is not the territory

Except in this care we actually understand and know how these models work. They aren't some unknown construct of the universe. They are human made with particular goals in mind.

There is no mysticism behind the curtains, just computer science + math.

For others: that's from the Pope's recent encyclical. Remarkably good description.

adding a link to the Pope's encyclical (source of this) https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume..., and paragraph 98

> anthropomorphism is literally in the company name

No it's not... "anthropos" just means "human" in ancient Greek. "Anthropic" means "relating to humans", as in human oriented AI or AI designed with humans in mind.

"Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped".

also useful to have a "chinese wall" between research that knows what went into the models vs marketing/eval models as a third party would

Not gonna lie! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csYC6O_kH-s