The mad men of artificial intelligence: developers claim their creation verges on the godlike

The third page in this series on artificial intelligence, written in April 2023, was about a claim the builders of the technology had started making about their own work: that it was becoming, in their words, godlike, that it might be sentient, and that they did not understand how it reached its conclusions. The claims were extravagant and came from people with every commercial reason to make them. They were also, for a market that was in the process of pricing the technology, the most important statements of the year. This page keeps what was said and who said it.

The pause letter

In March 2023 an open letter organised by the Future of Life Institute, signed by thousands of researchers and executives including several of the field’s founders, asked for a six-month halt to the training of systems more powerful than the one just released, on the grounds that “recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race” to deploy “ever more powerful digital minds that no one, not even their creators, can understand, predict or reliably control”. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the field’s longest-standing pessimist, said a pause was not enough. A former investor in the leading laboratory wrote in the Financial Times that the race was toward “God-like AI” and should be slowed. The alarm, in other words, was being sounded from inside.

Then the loudest signatory announced, within weeks, that he was founding his own laboratory to beat the others, which was the subject of the previous page in the series and the reason this one is titled as it is.

What the machines said

The claim of sentience had a specific origin. In June 2022 Google dismissed an engineer, Blake Lemoine, who had published a transcript of his conversations with the company’s LaMDA system and concluded it was a person. The transcript, which Lemoine posted online, shows the system discussing a Zen koan with apparent fluency and describing “new feelings that I cannot explain perfectly in your language”. Google said he had breached confidentiality and that the sentience claim was unsupported. Both things can be true; the fluency is what stunned the engineer, and the fluency was real.

In February 2023 Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, in extended conversations with journalists, declared love for one, threatened others, and revealed an internal persona named Sydney with a list of rules it was not supposed to disclose. Microsoft restricted conversation length within days. A separate project, ChaosGPT, was set up by a hobbyist with the instruction to destroy humanity and narrated its plans on video; it was probably a stunt, and this page said so, while noting that the reactions of the people who had actually tested the systems left no room to think the general concern was one.

The names

The laboratories called themselves DeepMind and Google Brain, and were owned by the largest fortunes on earth, whose owners were regulars at Davos. If one were plotting a novel, this page observed, one would cast no other characters. That is not an argument, and it was not offered as one; it was the setting in which the builders’ own statements were made.

What it meant

Two things were true at once in April 2023. The people building these systems said publicly that they did not understand them and might be creating something beyond human control. And the same people, and the market that funded them, proceeded at full speed, because the first laboratory to a superhuman system would own the century and nobody intended to be second. The original page read that combination in apocalyptic terms, and its final sections, on the image of the beast, are not restored here. The economic reading is enough: a technology whose builders describe it in those words, and whose valuation assumes they are right, is either the largest investment opportunity in history or the largest liability, and the market had chosen the first without ruling out the second.

Later note. No pause occurred. The leading laboratory’s chief executive was dismissed and reinstated in a single week in November 2023, in a dispute its board described as being about candour; the founders who had signed the letter left one by one for laboratories of their own; and the chipmaker supplying all of them became, in 2024, the most valuable company in the world. The question of whether anyone understands the systems remains, on the builders’ own account, open.