Artificial intelligence may already be ‘slightly conscious’, AI scientists warn

"MIT researcher Tamay Besiroglu joined OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever in warning that some machine learning AI may have achieved a limited form of sentience,"

The definition of "sentience" is missing which means the phrase "limited form of sentience" is meaningless. Provide a definition of "sentience" that is testable and can distinguish sentience from non-sentience.

Oh, your robot dog "knows" when you enter a room? That's amazing! So does my motion-detecting light switch. Neural nets recognize patterns? So does statistical pattern recognition, a field I studied in the 1970s. Reinforcement "deep learning"? Wow. You've discovered Norbert Wiener's work circa 1950.

The students get a failing grade.

I realize there is "big money" in the game. I realize Elon Musk is involved. He is someone I greatly respect and admire. I've used the OpenAI gym. I'm researching using deep neural nets for self-reproducing systems (to terraform Mars). I've looked into the reinforcement learning and the associated math. I have a deep background in robotics. I've built AI-related systems most of my life. It really annoys me to see "market-speak" nonsense pollute the research.

It is this kind of ill-founded market-speak that led to the first AI winter.

Such language is a cancer that will again grow into another AI winter.

Your achievements are amazing. Please stop trying to anthropomorphise them.