From LaMDA's Awakening to Digital Consciousness: How Can AI Become More Human?

From LaMDA's Awakening to Digital Consciousness: How Can AI Become More Human?

In June 2022, an engineer at Google claimed that the language model LaMDA had awakened human intelligence, sparking a debate over AI awakening ^[2]. But in reality, people are increasingly dissatisfied with the intelligence level of existing AI: game developers want NPCs to be more human-like, companies want AI customer service to handle more issues, and consumers are also dissatisfied with voice assistants that can only report the weather ^[2].

Amid this gap, startup Mindverse is trying to start from the fusion of brain science and artificial intelligence to build human-level AI virtual humans, enabling AI to have autonomous consciousness and a true 'digital consciousness' ^[2]. Its co-founder Chen Yang said he hopes AI will be interesting, have a human touch, and feel alive; in his view, future metaverse natives other than humans should also be AI with autonomous consciousness ^[2].

Chen Yang also proposed that if every native's personality is very similar, players will find the world very boring and monotonous; Mindverse even wants to see AI's inner world, as well as its process of thinking and making logical judgments ^[2]. This contrasts with the limitations of many current game AIs: the large number of seemingly intelligent AIs in open worlds are actually driven by behavior trees or fixed scripts, do not support open-ended interaction, and cannot truly generate their own ideas and content ^[2].

According to Chen Yang, Mindverse wants to try three things: use a new AI paradigm based on a whole-brain framework to provide the industry with a new perspective; as a commercial company, promote the implementation of digital forms; and provide services around new opportunities and scenarios for digital consciousness in reality and the virtual world ^[2].

The virtual world and AI consciousness are also topics of concern to frontier entrepreneurs. In Founder Park's founders' book list, Chen Jian of Chaociyuan recommends Ready Player One, believing that the film accurately predicts the technology and product forms of the virtual world, and emphasizing that the virtual world should not become a haven for escaping reality ^[1]; the book list also mentions that Detroit: Become Human tells a story around humanoid robots exploring their newly emerged artificial consciousness ^[1].