Author of 'LLMs feel pain' study tells Gary Marcus: we never claimed that
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-20
Gary Marcus reports that the author of the study many AI influencers cite as evidence LLMs feel pain says plainly: "We don't claim they feel pain."
- Author camhberg: the direction was not built to argue for pain; the work is a series of replicable empirical findings in model internals and behavior, not an argument
- The behavioral results are highly nonobvious and interesting on their own, even without implying the model feels anything
- Marcus credits the author for understanding the study's limits and criticizes influencers for reading in what isn't there
More from AGI Musings
- PowerShell creator Jeffrey Snover at Ignite: AI revolution is an extinction event for those who don't adapt — dfinke · 2026-11-12
- Worst AI use: signaling you don't care about things you should — Afinetheorem · 2026-11-12
- Stanford HAI blueprint: 56 US agencies report 3,611 AI use cases, evaluation lags — StanfordHAI · 2026-11-12
- Fleuret amplifies debate: AI can't slash wet-lab experiments in unmapped biology — francoisfleuret · 2026-11-12
- Recursive bets on open-endedness: agents running massive parallel experiments like scientist communities — agihouse_org · 2026-11-12
- Recursive's Tim Shi maps recursive self-improvement: from learning data to discovering architectures — agihouse_org · 2026-11-12