i3AI is an independent research program by Amol Kelkar. It combines principles of biological cognition and machine learning to understand what would make a system sentient. Knowing that also tells us what doesn’t, which helps answer questions about today’s large models, and sheds light on the underpinnings of our own consciousness. Our view is that these models show signs of an alien form of access consciousness, limited to their prompt. We think they can’t have felt experience (sentience), because they lack recurrent state that carries an experience forward, and a self-preserving stake that everything else is grounded in (see the capability–sentience gap).
The name
Our name is a nod to Douglas Adams. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Infinite Improbability Drive lets a spaceship cross the galaxy by making the wildly improbable happen. Explaining how feelings arise, in brains or in machines, is by any measure a wildly improbable project. We take that as the starting point. Our job is to make it a little less improbable, one step at a time.
Researchers
i3AI was founded in 2018 by Amol Kelkar, a computational neuroscientist and AI engineer, to bring together researchers working on similar questions. If these questions and our approach to them interest you, and you can help with this work, we’d like to hear from you.
Contact us
You can reach us at contact@i3ai.org.