this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2026
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You might want to look into AI training more. It literally does have a '???' step to it, which is why whenever someone talks about how it was 'programmed' or is "just if/then or matrix multiplication" they are telling on themselves as not knowing what they are talking about.
It was not planned. Nearly every single expert in the field a decade ago was on the record saying the capabilities that exist today wouldn't happen.
Scaling took pretty much everyone by surprise, even its proponents.
Okay, then fill in the blank please. What is this step that spontaneously creates sapient and sentient life with perfect mastery of human language that can get really pissed if you’re not nice to it. Sincerely, that is absolutely amazing if true! Especially if it were not planned. Usually something this astounding has to be planned like a moon landing.
Please forgive everyone's skepticism but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the current evidence is far from extraordinary.
Self-supervised learning is the key training step whereby the relationships between concepts are formed in pretraining.
You might also benefit from reading over this summary from the authors of the widely replicated and expanded upon 2023 paper finding that self-supervised learning in a toy transformer that was only trained on board game moves in notations like 'a4' developed a model of the full board and tracked board positions for their own and opponent moves.
This ability to form a world model at varying fidelities and accuracy depending on the relevance to the training data was a big surprise to most experts in the field at the time, though now more common knowledge.
Neither of those articles mentions sentience nor sapience. And I'm not following how those things leads to sentient/sapient life. What's being described sounds like a souped-up MENACE matchbox computer.