LLMs aren't sentient; they lack the physiological states required for sensations like hunger and pain, and thus can't have subjective experiences of such states
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the term used to describe an artificial agent that is at least as intelligent as a human …
TIME
Context & Ripple Effects
This argument enters a long-running effort to separate impressive language-model behavior from claims about minds. Earlier coverage noted broad expert dismissal of LaMDA sentience claims, while a separate AGI taxonomy treated “emerging” capability as a distinct threshold rather than proof of consciousness an emerging-AGI classification.
First-order effects
It gives the AGI discussion a concrete distinction: human-level task capability and subjective experience are not interchangeable claims.
Anthropomorphic descriptions of LLM outputs face a clearer evidentiary challenge, because fluent dialogue alone does not establish bodily sensation or inner experience.
Second-order effects
Developers and commentators discussing AGI may need to specify whether they mean performance, autonomy, or consciousness; conflating those categories becomes easier to contest.
The distinction is especially consequential for AI companion narratives, where user-facing emotional language can encourage people to infer experience from conversational behavior.
Third-order effects
If this framing persists, AI governance debates may increasingly separate rules for capable software from any future framework for systems credibly argued to have moral status.
The broader AGI debate could shift toward operational benchmarks and taxonomies rather than treating a single intelligence label as evidence of consciousness.
The trend: AI discourse is moving toward separating model capability, agent autonomy, and consciousness instead of treating them as one AGI question.
I have been saying this for *years* about “self driving,” but months about LLMs. And I am not an expert. I can just see the obvious. FWIW, it's probably better to not call this a “last 20%” problem and admit that, in terms of work required, it's the last 90%. IE, 80% of respo…
Yeah there's no way that generative AI gets us to approaching AGI. They are not building it and it is not what's coming out of ChatGPT or anything related to ChatGPT [embedded post]
A wonderful writeup in @time by John Etchemendy, a great teacher of my life, and my friend @drfeifei both co-directors of @StanfordHAI on the non-sentience of LLMs. https://time.com/...
In colloquial language of course this might be seen as the same thing, but if you expect to write about these things as an intellectual you need to be more precise or I just can't take you seriously. The article doesn't even start to grapple with the real questions.
As the article briefly alludes to — asking whether a particular version of AI is conscious distracts from the real question. The more interesting — & actually unsettled/ debated by relevant experts — question is whether consciousness is possible in non-biological substrates. [ima…
I disagree with claims that we *know* LLMs aren't conscious. Fairly unlikely, perhaps, but not inconceivable that the functional dynamics constitutive of subjectivity could be realised in large Transformers. Not enough scientific consensus about consciousness to rule it out.
@drfeifei ... there are so, so many things wrong with this article. “One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is ‘sentience’” False! We're confident that animals without human reasoning capabilities are sentient, and it's perfectly coherent to consider intelli…
I like this view a lot. I think it's also relevant for more broad questions in alignment around where the agency in ML models is. It especially becomes tricky due to conditional generation, where the behavior depends heavily on the prompt itself.
@drfeifei ... your argument boils down to “AI doesn't have a body and hallucinates statements about experiences it cannot possibly have, therefore it can't be sentient”. But how do we know these are dealbreakers? You say yourself that we don't know how sentience emerges. Except i…
This is a bad argument imo. Humans have physiological signals of pain, hunger, etc., but the conscious states are all processes in the brain. Hence phantom limb syndrome, dreaming, or the ability to induce tastes and smells from neural stimulation. The truth is that we simply [im…
Is AI sentient? My friend and colleague Prof. John Etchemendy, a renowned professor and co-Director of @StanfordHAI , just co-authored this piece to debunk the claim that today's LLMs are sentient @TIME https://time.com/...
@mealreplacer “All sensations... are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn't have. Consequently we know that an LLM cannot have subjective experiences of those states.” So I guess someone who's had an arm amputated can't possibly feel any kind of ‘phantom pa…
@drfeifei ... His argument rests on the assumption that physiological states like hunger can only be embodied in the specific manner humans embody them. He should be asking if an AI can be hungry for *resources* not food. And the “only predicts the next symbol” argument has alway…
LLMs are simulators. They might contain sentient beings or not, but the LLM itself is no more sentient than the laws of physics are. If there's sentience, it's existing a layer up.
Though I highly doubt current LLMs are capable of having subjective experiences, it's an important and poorly understood question — one that deserves better than a “debunking” by an op-ed that doesn't even really attempt to engage with different theories of consciousness.
I think the arguments in this article only support that LLMs don't have a human-like sentience. It does not rule out that they have some different kind: maybe LLMs feel some “satistfaction” when it produces the sentence “I feel terrible”, as it enjoys predicting text.
Two years ago Google fired Blake Lemoine for trying to free their LLM-based chatbot believing it was sentient. The rise of ChatGPT has caused more people to agree with him. The problem is that people conflate passing the Turing Test with sentience. …
This is a fantastic piece on why Large Language Models are not in any way, shape, or form, sentient. And this is also why they are the wrong direction if you were really interested in building actual Artificial General Intelligence [embedded post]
By referring to LLMs as AI, we've created a growing problem. AI suggests some form of “intelligence” (in the name!) And so by referring to “AI tools” (that are LLM tools!) many assume we're talking about this. But LLMs are not behaving like we expect “intelligence” to do so.
General intelligence, artificial or natural, does not exist. Cats, dogs, humans and all animals have specialized intelligence. They have different collections of skills and an ability to acquire new ones quickly. Much of animal and human intelligence is acquired through observ…