No case for AI consciousness: stateless transformers can't host a self, argues Sans
gerardsans · x · 2026-09-24
Gerard Sans argues AI consciousness has no technical footing: frontier models are stateless transformers — each output conditioned independently on input against a frozen corpus, with no shared state, so no self or world model can exist. Chat identity is a curated illusion of first-person UI, system-prompt personas, and RLHF; change one link and the speaker disappears. 'Sampling is not a mind. A distribution is not a self.'
More from AGI Musings
- On AI Progress: When Models Lag on Your Load-Bearing Skill, You Can't See Them Improving — dfrsrchtwts · 2026-11-12
- Slack's David Hoang: agents beat people on coordination, proposes 'boundary agents' — davidhoang · 2026-11-12
- CS student mourns coding flow states he'll never experience in the AI era — chrissyykat · 2026-11-12
- Ford's 370% Turnover Led to $5 Days — But ASI Never Quits — krishnan · 2026-11-12
- Against 'verifiable vs. fuzzy': the real axis is how expensive tasks are to grade — dfrsrchtwts · 2026-11-12
- Toby Ord flags 'all-things-considered' AGI forecast table is actually conditional on no pacing — tobyordoxford · 2026-11-12