| Nothing to do with being sentient. I think it has to do with being able to teach itself arbitrary information, including how to learn better, and importantly recognize what it does and doesn't know. LLMs feel like a massive step towards that. It feels similar to a single "thought process". A "good / useful AGI" might have aspects such as:
- Ability to coherently communicate with humans (hard to prove it's working without this) and other agents.
- Ability to make use of arbitrary tools This sounds very similar to AutoGPT (what people poke fun of as an llm in a while loop)- and if the brain was AGI- I think it'd work very well. I think there's a critical difference between LLMs and AGI, which is metacognition. If an LLM had proper metacognition maybe it would hallucinate, but then it would realize and say "actually I'm not sure and I just started hallucinating that answer- I think I need to learn more about xyz." And then (ideally) could go ahead and do that (or ask if it should). Another piece I've thought about is subjective experience. Inserting experiences into a vector store recalling them in triggering situations. |
That is, humans can sense the surrounding world. (Some people call that sentience.) Humans can think about what they sense, organize it, categorize it, find patterns, think both inductively and deductively. (Some people call that sapience.) But humans can do something else - as they think, they can observe their own thinking, and then think about that. "How do I reason? Why did I decide that? How do I determine what evidence is accurate?" I don't know if "metacognition" the the word that people use for that, but it's part of what I think AGI is.