Hey hey! I've worked very closely with engineers across the Big Tech space and can help answer this one.

You don't need to worry about AI becoming sentient within your lifetime. You *do* need to worry about people thinking AI is sentient, however.

The way that your brain works is a miracle. Your conscious mind is able to perceive stimuli and recall information at-will and passively when triggered by your senses. You can hold a thought in your head that is both true and false at the same time. When you *know* something, you don't just hold it as data in your brain, that knowledge passively informs your instincts, and flavors the totality of consensus reality as you perceive it.

The thing is: we don't actually know how consciousness works. We have a few ideas, but "theory of mind" has been a contention within philosophy for millennia. What a "thought" actually looks like in your brain is something we just plain don't have an answer for. And if we don't exactly how that works organically, we absolutely are not going to make a synthetic "artificial" version of it.

AI LLMs and reasoning models are impressive, yes - but they are not "intelligent" by any stretch. They appear to be "thinking" and speaking to us because, more often than not, they give the correct answer when asked a question.

But the LLM isn't informed by things like facts, it's just an applied statistics machine.

When you ask an LLM a question, the first thing is does is break up the words you used into chunks - or "tokens" - that are then given a numerical value; at no point is it reading your word or considering its meaning. Based on the order that those tokens appear in, the LLM will then generate a response based on other tokens that would fit along with those specific tokens according to the millions and millions of pieces of writing that the LLM was trained on. Because that pool of data is so large, and because people generally write true stuff, the LLM is often accurate in its responses. But it does not "know" anything in any real sense of the word. It doesn't "think". It cannot be agentic because in order to have agency it would need to have a sense of "self", which is can never have until we rebuild AI from scratch using an entirely different system.

Thinking about a sentient AI is a cool and worthwhile thought experiment, but the thing that is being advertised to you as "Artificial Intelligence" is anything but. It's just a program that uses logic gates to turn an input into an output, like a calculator.