“I ran the standard AI litmus tests on my two toddlers (yep)” by Carlo Valenti

In July 2022 I was in a parking lot with a Portuguese colleague, trying to fix the cargo-metering system of a 12-ton tanker truck. During a break I read a headline on my phone: Google engineer claims experimental AI went sentient. An engineer (like me!), from Google, testing an AI (I do tests too!), claimed it had become sentient.

I could not believe it. LaMDA was describing itself as a globe of light, claiming fear of being shut down, meditating during the long pauses between chats. If I were an artificial intelligence, I would definitely not present myself as a scared light bulb doing yoga; still, the thing didn't fade for me with the online hype. The experts said: "Eliza effect", "stochastic parrot", a machine repeating words in sequences made plausible by maniacal statistical matching. Fine; but I wanted to understand that answer, not repeat it as a parrot, and everything I found either stopped at the pop-science mantras or assumed I already knew the whole thing.

So I wrote my own transformer engine, in C language, from scratch. It took about 18 months (during lunch breaks and weekend nights) (TRiP, on GitHub). It runs the weights [...]

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Outline:

(02:09) The stochastic parrot

(03:21) Emergent properties

(04:26) One-shot learners

(05:32) My point

(07:06) ...and something I can't explain...

(07:56) I stop here

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First published:
July 21st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fEbCiHHeD73xcZWht/i-ran-the-standard-ai-litmus-tests-on-my-two-toddlers-yep

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.