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Any researcher emotionally sane either:
Quit years ago because they understood the risks (Hinton, Kokotajlo, arguably Sutskever), or
Doesn't understand the potential of the technology well enough to make meaningful progress (LeCunn, Chollet).
Meta AI hires normal people. Look where that's gotten them.
Don’t underestimate them. AI is still very expensive for AGI-like tasks (Astra solving ARC-AGI3 cost $19k) and still missing capabilities (flexible robotics, tacit memory, autonomously building scalable systems). What they’re working on, embodiment and continuous learning, may solve both, and unlock a great well of improvement that makes even the achievements we see today seem slow and limited (a true singularity?)
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Was claiming that Neural Nets were conscious in 2022, mentally stable is not the group I would put him in.
I'm not sure "understanding the potential" is a requirement for making meaningful progress. The real answer would be "believing in transformers as the pathway", it easily is the case that LeCunn or Chollet were just not interested in brute force approaches to AGI, or believed that it will reach an asymptote. Their emotionally stability isn't really relevant.
All the frontier and non-frontier labs are filled with sane researchers, they just don't flame out so they don't get 15 mins of fame. You listing the top 5 AI/ML researchers in the world by fame is confounding visibility as a variable.
Meta hires, and more importantly retains, ambitious corporate strivers who can play the game well (to survive stack ranking long term). Which means all those ambitious strivers immediately got themselves connected to the AI projects as corporate leeches. They don't really do much "research" but it looks good on their CV. Just look at Alex Wang. Zuck acquired him, put him in charge and he goes and does the same thing he did previously: make people label data. That's all he knows how to do, thats his playbook, that and being good as a operator/marketer. Meta does not hire "normal" people, normal people don't put up with that level of abuse.
Do you mean when he said "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious"? I wouldn't call that insane. There's no way to scientifically establish whether or not anything is conscious.
The "slightly conscious" phrase could be construed as being wrong, since the reality is that consciousness is binary: subjective experience is either there or it's not there. But maybe by "slightly", Sutskever just meant that AI is conscious but only for short stretches of time. In which case, I wouldn't say there's anything clearly wrong with the statement.
It's not "insane" it's mentally unstable. There is a colloquial definition of consciousness that does not follow from a strict scientific definition. Essentially "normal" or "stable" people have some intuitive definition of consciousness, very "I know it when I see it". Stable people do not think in-animate objects or mathematical tools are "slightly conscious", it's a nutter view. I don't think "slightly" is being used temporally, I think Sutskever is using it in the colloquial definition as "achieving consciousness". The jump from, idk, Tree -> Cat.
It's hallucinatory, or faith-based on a non-faith-based subject.
Maybe this is just my personal bias, but every time I've head Sutskever talk I get the impression that he's the sort of person akin to a rationalist who upon hearing of Roko's basilisk, starts "rolling on the floor" hyperventilating, is tortured in his sleep by the thought. The people for whom Roko's basilisk is an actual infohazard. That is not mental stability, that is neuroticism.
In the quote that I found, Sutskever is not saying that he thinks AI is conscious. He's saying he thinks it might be. And I don't think that's a nutter view.
In any case, I'm not sure that what "normal" or "stable" people think about consciousness really matters. The average person doesn't even really understand the differences between subjective experience, self-awareness, having a self-concept, and intelligence. Even large numbers of highly technically skilled people don't understand these differences, even though they're not really hard to understand... a bright 10 year old could understand them. And then there are the leagues of otherwise intelligent software developers on Hacker News, for example, who don't understand what the "hard problem of consciousness" or why it might be a problem.
But even if the "I know it when I see it" view corresponds to reality, it seems to me that this is not a good argument against AI being conscious, since a large though minority number of people feel that AI is conscious when they interact with it.
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