Are AI Models Conscious?

Anthropic is conducting research on model welfare, essentially checking if models are showing signs of consciousness and, if found, determining how to ‘humanely’ treat the models.

I’m not afraid to say that I think this is ridiculous. At some point, perhaps I’ll change my mind.

At the core, the question is if non-biological ‘thinking’ entities can have consciousness, and behind that question, do humans actually have free will or are our brains essentially electrical and chemical computers?

I believe in free will, although I don’t know how it works. And I don’t believe fully deterministic machines can have consciousness (although it doesn’t necessarily follow that a deterministic machine cannot have consciousness).

Anthropic:

But as we build those AI systems, and as they begin to approximate or surpass many human qualities, another question arises. Should we also be concerned about the potential consciousness and experiences of the models themselves? Should we be concerned about model welfare, too?

This is an open question, and one that’s both philosophically and scientifically difficult. But now that models can communicate, relate, plan, problem-solve, and pursue goals—along with very many more characteristics we associate with people—we think it’s time to address it.

To that end, we recently started a research program to investigate, and prepare to navigate, model welfare.

AI News

AI News

First, some notes on Gemini as I posted them to my Slack group:

Last week Google released Gemini 2.5. Free on their AI studio website if you don’t mind them training on your chats. In the API, Gemini has a context window of 2,000,000 tokens, about 1,500,000 words. Compare this to Sonnet, at 200,000 tokens which is higher than most OpenAI models. But, in previous Google models using anywhere near that number of tokens decreased performance.

ChatGPT put their 4o image creator out which is the best I’ve seen bar none. It can also make iterative improvements on images without completely losing context. It does text well too.

Here are three images I asked 4o to make, each building on each other (Top Guns is the name of my peer group)

Illustration of a group of people working on computers with a sign above them reading "Top Guns."
A group of five people gathered around vintage computer equipment, with a sign reading "Top Guns" on the wall behind them.
A group of six people gathered around vintage computer monitors, smiling and engaged. A sign above them reads "Top Guns."

This kind of continuity between images was previously unheard of. Expect to see it in their video gen soon

I don’t remember if I linked to LMArena before, the de facto leaderboard for AI. Gemini 2.5 has a substantial lead there.

https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard

Current Leaderboard (2025-04-01)

Table displaying rankings of various models. Columns include "Rank* (UB)", "Rank (StyleCtrl)", "Model", and "Arena Score". Top-ranked models are "Gemini-2.5-Pro-Exp-03-25" with a score of 1440, followed by "ChatGPT-4o-latest (2025-03-26)" with 1406, and "Grok-3-Preview-02-24" with 1404.

If look closely, you’ll see that ChatGPT is second place with an update to an existing model that they didn’t make a big deal of.

DeepSeek takes both 5 and 7.

But, Google also released Gemma3, open source models based on their Gemini work. In limited testing, Gemma3 performs strong on my Mac at 27b parameters. Compare, R1 has 671b.

I don’t see Gemma3 on LMArena at all yet.

Second, reporting from The Information on OpenAI financials:

ChatGPT has hit 20 million paid subscribers, according to a spokesperson… 

The strong growth rate suggests ChatGPT is currently generating at least $415 million in revenue per month (a pace of $5 billion a year), up 30% from at least $333 million per month ($4 billion annually) at the end of last year.

The actual figure could be somewhat higher, given that corporate ChatGPT plans are more expensive and the company has had early success selling $200-a-month Pro plans, which are 10 times more expensive than basic ChatGPT Plus plans…

ChatGPT revenue is separate from [API sales]…

If OpenAI keeps up this growth rate or anything like it, its overall revenue projection of $12.7 billion in 2025, up from about $4 billion in 2024, seems well within reach.

Third (update),

I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 Pro thought Cline for a couple of hours today. I don’t know that I’d call it significantly better than Sonnet 3.7, or Claude Code. Despite the huge context window

Google Removes DEI Language

Google Removes DEI Language

The Information reports that Google is removing language from studies, even old ones, or telling researchers to restrict access to such documents.

This is a clear example of government pressure leading to self-censorship like we are used to seeing China.

Two imporant points of context.

  1. Google has often been willing to self-censor to keep business
  2. It’s clear that the Biden admin pressured big tech as well
OpenAI Adopts MCP

OpenAI Adopts MCP

My notes to my peer group on the adoption of MCP by OpenAI:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1904957755829481737.html?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

MCP 🤝 OpenAI Agents SDK

You can now connect your Model Context Protocol servers to Agents:

We’re also working on MCP support for the OpenAI API and ChatGPT desktop app—we’ll share some more news in the coming months.

This is a big deal. It means that MCP just became the de facto protocol for connecting LLMs to outside systems.

I also suspect it will increase the speed at which MCP gets past a couple of roadblocks, the biggest being its single-user paradigm which makes it hard to roll out on a hosted platform. (Stateful API calls thru stdio for the programmers here).

Today, MCP “servers” are more like plugins for Claude desktop than actual servers. You run them locally.

Soon, ChatGPT desktop users will be able to use them too.

In turn, it means at some point you’ll have users downloading and installing them on their own. That day is a little ways off: the SDKs are only for Python and Node (JavaScript) which both run great on macOS and Linux but are a royal PITA to get going on Windows. Whenever a .Net or Java SDK is released though I’d expect to see a significant uptick in user-level usage.