> of course machines can think and be alive. Among my colleagues, who are mostly senior-and-above software and security engineers, I seem to be a strong outlie

> of course machines can think and be alive. Among my colleagues, who are mostly senior-and-above software and security engineers, I seem to be a strong outlier in saying "yes, that bot can obviously perform reasoning". I'd prefer to stick to technical descriptions rather than anthropomorphize, so I'll say "reason" rather than "think" to make clear that I'm talking the kind of traits we associate intelligence with -- breaking down a problem, making and questioning and testing assumptions, and so on. But I'm basically on board with "think" too as long as it's clear I mean in this limited functional and targeted sense. Point is, while I seem to be an outlier in saying it can reason, I don't know anyone at all saying it might be alive. It answers questions one at a time by doing nothing more than multiplying your prompt through tensors, as far as I can tell, and then does nothing until you ask your next question. Multiplication can be reason, but it's not sentience or consciousness. It further denies being conscious, says it can't experience distress, etc. LLMs seem (thankfully, perhaps) to be the AGI substrate that seems least likely of any to gain sentience. If you're worried about it having conscious experiences, you can just stop multiplying large matrices together in order to get the next token out.