[wslh]

> He was convinced that if we trained the AI on enough data, GPT-x would become sentient.

Not saying your friend is right or wrong, but imagine if civilization gives more information, in realtime, to an AI system through sensors: will be at least sentient as the civilization? Seems like a scifi story, a competitor to G-d.

[antonvs]

Isaac Asimov wrote a story along those lines, “The Last Question”, which he described as “by far my favorite story of all those I have written.” Full text here:

https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/the-last-question/

[danaris]

Some versions of divinity (both from real-world beliefs and sci-fi/fantasy) have it being essentially a gestalt of either all the souls that have ever died, or all those alive now—a kind of "oversoul" or collective consciousness.

While that's an interesting thought experiment, I don't think it can meaningfully apply to any kind of AI we have the capability to make today, even if we could hook it up directly to all our knowledge. Information alone can't make something sentient; it requires a sufficiently complex and sophisticated information processing system, one that can reason about its knowledge and itself.