Because we have such solid and airtight definitions of "consciousness" and "sentience".

Yeah, that’s my main beef with this article. There is not even an attempt, just waving hands and saying they are not.

Decades and decades of “turing test” talk until they can pass it.

Mind: Turing test doesn't test for actual thinking though, just functional indistinguishability. Turing sidestepped the problem way back when.

> are trained on what we told them we do. They don’t “think” at all. They’re a mixmaster of other people’s ideas, cleverly packaged in a way that we perceive as natural.

Sometimes I wonder how this is different from most of my education. Or my creativity, mixing ideas together to see if they still make sense with other things I have been told.

"what is 16929481231+22312333222?" is an easy way to test this claim. Pick large enough numbers and there's no way all the sums of that size would fit into the dataset (you don't need to stick to + either, but it's the simplest thing that works)

But if you were to ask that same question to a human with no specific math training there are exceedingly low odds they would get the right answer.

We spend hours and hours over reinforced over years to have humans that can do it.

Indeed! So, where are you going with this?

For my contribution to the conversation: Earlier/cheaper models can't do it either, they make mistakes, they need a calculator/jupiter kernel/what have you. 'Medium' models will put the numbers underneath each other and do it 'properly' in a table, checking themselves after. Claude Opus 4.6 (the current rolls royce today) just says the answer in one go sometimes (it's a monster). But all of them end up spending many seconds and thousands of tokens on a task that takes a calculator or an ALU fractions of a second.

Can I say something? In the cusp of civilisational scale of technological revolution, it may be important to seriously consider and explore ideas that may seem outlandish.

Every single such revolution probably involved so called level headed people calling out the hype bro's. Just take a look at this: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times/1903/10/9/... (people really thought Aeroplanes were never going to happen).

I don't disagree that we need some level-headedness to counteract some outrageous predictions but please remember that it is more or less given that every step change in technology involves a level headed person dismissing the technology.

Since it happens so unfrequently, there are obvious incentives to take the role of a levelheaded person instead of a hype-bro because you will be right dismiss 100 hypes that don't materialise.

Nearly every sentence of this is a logical fallacy.

You should provide evidence & examples for your claims if you want to be taken seriously.

Precisely!

No need to engage with an article that makes naked assertions with little backing.

Ok, fine then...:

"But they have no more consciousness, sensitivity, and sentience than a hammer. " -- naked assertion, no backing, no definition, no ope rationalization, no scientific or philosophical work shown (and this is a spicy one, because there's been philosophical turf wars on this for half a century, you can't just ASSERT that)

"Every device made by man has an off switch. We can use it sometimes." -- I have stories. Semi-Explosive near death stories. At any rate... uh, not quite?

Look, at very least he's sloppy here. Mostly just a raw opinion piece I guess, but not really backed by much that is real. Just so you know, this cost me more time than the text even deserves.