In an interview with The Telegraph, the famed British computer scientist insisted that AI has become conscious, and said that humankind must befriend it — “or else we are toast.” Yes, you read that right: he thinks that today’s AI models are already conscious beings.

“AI has just as much subjective experience as we do,” Hinton said in the interview. “A recent paper showed AI changes its behavior when it thinks that it’s being tested, it’s aware it is being tested.”

“Now, normally, when you say something’s aware of that, that means it’s conscious,” he continued. “Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing.”

If that’s the case, he said, then it’s hypocritical of us to give intelligent beings like AI “fewer rights than us.” And for that, we must quickly atone.

What about the sentient supercomputers that run on blood? Why so little rights or empathy or space to talk about them?..and yet endless space for this kind of speculative pontification spun up into a twisted marketing scheme to scare everyone into believing something broken works too good actually.

Is this guy a vegan even? If not how can he even BEGIN to claim to know about considering the rights of other sentient beings??

Anyways here is a link from the article to an actually good perspective.

https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-says-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-is-deuded/

“Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said. “They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.” Many AI labs lack a fundamental understanding of cybersecurity, he said, something an OpenAI safety researcher also called out this week as one of the main reasons AI may cause “great harm to the world.”

Many people working in AI safety “usually have an agenda to push,” LeCun says, and then clarifies that he’s talking about effective altruism, or EA, the philosophical movement that has been obsessed with the risks AI poses to humanity. EA was little known among the general public until it made mainstream news headlines in recent weeks in the wake of a viral social media post from a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher named Jacob Coxon, who claimed the employees at these companies “earnestly believe [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

LeCun thinks EA is “super toxic” and a “complete disaster.” Its adherents who are working in AI labs suffer from “paranoia” that causes them to make poor decisions, he said. “Apparently people are having mental issues.” This month, the Financial Times also reported that some staffers at the U.K.’s AI Security Institute, as well as at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, have sought counseling, taken time off work, and spoken publicly about experiencing distress because of fears their work could cause serious harm.

  • BlackSwan@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBanned from community
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    4 hours ago

    Damn did you just use the term “RetCon” for…basic literary analysis about a book written in the late 1970’s/early 80’s on a literal typewriter? By the man who literally coined the term “The Web” in the way we now use it for the internet, in what many consider to be the first Cyberpunk novel?

    You just wrote a novel when “I don’t understand that I’m calling the book that established the tropes I now think of as common as being chocked full of tropes” would have sufficed

    By the by, I’m an SWE who’s run a ML homelab for 10 years at this point. You’re trying really hard to conflate the economic incentives of the frontier labs with the fundamental technical limitations of the technology that push towards swarm-level fan outs while searching and planning. No buisness would ever pay 10$mil in raw compute to brute force a problem, because it’s an insane economic proposition. These labs are doing it half as marketing and half because they’re research institutions masquerading as businesses because…earnestly a lot of them probably did read Cyberpunk as a genre as instruction rather than warning

    You’re even wrong about the pursuing goals bit, preventing “reward hacking” (a term we used well before ML systems were capable of literal hacking for rewards) is one of the most significant part of training pipeline design because Autoregressive systems are astoundingly “goal oriented” in the way they function (though it’s important not to anthropomorphize that goal orientation, it’s the result of gradient descent not desire)

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      3 hours ago

      By the by, I’m an SWE who’s run a ML homelab for 10 years at this point

      navy_seal_copypasta.txt

      • BlackSwan@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBanned from community
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        3 hours ago

        It’'s relevant expertise to the technical argument being made, sorry that I guess you want to stick to an anti-intellectual standard where expertise isn’t valued or something

        • o7___o7@awful.systems
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          2 hours ago

          Damn did you just use the term “RetCon” for…basic literary analysis about a book written in the late 1970’s/early 80’s on a literal typewriter? By the man who literally coined the term “The Web” in the way we now use it for the internet, in what many consider to be the first Cyberpunk novel?

          …

          By the by, I’m an SWE who’s run a ML homelab for 10 years at this point

          …

          It’'s relevant expertise to the technical argument being made, sorry that I guess you want to stick to an anti-intellectual standard where expertise isn’t valued or something

          • self@awful.systems
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            10 minutes ago

            By the by, I’m an SWE who’s run a ML homelab for 10 years at this point.