[lambert_]

The key is “every possible conversation.” The reason it seems to support what you’re saying is that the human mind can’t imagine a list large enough to contain all that. So it goes to compare an ordinary grocery list to a human mind and therefore naturally hash tables could never be sentient.

When DALLE 2 creates a new image of an entirely novel scene, is it just copying and pasting? Of course not. It is distilling and reasoning in concepts. You can’t escape that. GTP and friends are doing something similar. Brushing aside these astounding strides as statistical tricks of the eye is stupid. Clearly these training algorithms are discovering things that are much deeper. There’s no reason to think sentience has been achieved but you are absolutely fooling yourself about the nature and trajectory of these programs.