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You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).

There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.

by jacquesm7 hours ago|

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It's not just the people here, there is also a lot of money behind this concept. For instance, Anthropic named their LLM 'Claude', which is the name of a person. Right from day #1 they want you to think of their AI as a living entity. 'Siri' and 'Alexa' had similar connotations. OpenAI and DeepSeek do this in a far more neutral and technically oriented way.

by epihelix2 hours ago|

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Well, when you name your company "Anthropic", what do you expect? I remain surprised that this continues to get a free pass.

by Lerc11 hours ago|

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if you look at https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer

It's obvious a LLM can do anything a computer can do.

As an answer to "Why would LLMs exhibit sentience?"

It is because that would mean that no algorithm could exhibit sentience, claiming that would require some causal action that cannot be performed by an algorithm to create sentience. Some people like to point to quantum effects, but that would require the cause of sentience to be pure randomness. That seems even less plausible. Absent of any evidence that human brains are doing something that no algorithm could do, it would be reasonable to assume that sentience could be algorithmically obtained.

by jacquesm7 hours ago|

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To argue this you have to prove the opposite: that consciousness is an algorithm. Not that an algorithm can simulate consciousness, that's a far easier task.

by Lerc4 hours ago|

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This isn't an argument to say that algorithms must be capable of consciousness, or that all Consciousness must be algorithms. It is an argument to show the consequence of declaring that LLMs are not capable of consciousness is to claim no computer is.

by fwip10 hours ago|

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"Sentience could be algorithmically obtained" is a much weaker claim than "LLMs are almost sentient."

We've had computers that can do anything computers can do for as long as we've had computers.

by Lerc5 hours ago|

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The claim has never been LLMs are almost sentient. The claim has always been LLMs might be capable of sentience. You can make a trivial tiny LLM that is clearly not sentient.

I was addressing the argument that something is not sentient because it is a LLM. That requires all LLMs to be non-sentient, and by extension, since LLMs can do all algorithims, all algorithms must not be sentient.