内容摘要：They were unable to compete in the final leg after running out of money, but Sam described it as a "

They were unable to compete in the final leg after running out of money, but Sam described it as a "

"We did not have these conversations enough with the rise of social media, much to our collective detriment. But with AI, it is not too late. We can decide what we want."But there are some in the tech sector who believe that the AI in our computers and phones may already be conscious, and we should treat them as such.

Google suspended software engineer Blake Lemoine in 2022, after he argued that AI chatbots could feel things and potentially suffer.In November 2024, an AI welfare officer for Anthropic, Kyle Fish, co-authored a report suggesting that AI consciousness was a realistic possibility in the near future. He recently told The New York Times that he also believed that there was a small (15%) chance that chatbots are already conscious.One reason he thinks it possible is that no-one, not even the people who developed these systems, knows exactly how they work. That's worrying, says Prof Murray Shanahan, principal scientist at Google DeepMind and emeritus professor in AI at Imperial College, London.

"We don't actually understand very well the way in which LLMs work internally, and that is some cause for concern," he tells the BBC.According to Prof Shanahan, it's important for tech firms to get a proper understanding of the systems they're building – and researchers are looking at that as a matter of urgency.

"We are in a strange position of building these extremely complex things, where we don't have a good theory of exactly how they achieve the remarkable things they are achieving," he says. "So having a better understanding of how they work will enable us to steer them in the direction we want and to ensure that they are safe."

The prevailing view in the tech sector is that LLMs are not currently conscious in the way we experience the world, and probably not in any way at all. But that is something that the married couple Profs Lenore and Manuel Blum, both emeritus professors at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, believe will change, possibly quite soon.The company's stock price also tumbled by as much as 45%, but has mostly rebounded and is only down 10%.

Tesla recently warned investors that the financial pain could continue, declining to offer a growth forecast while saying "changing political sentiment" could meaningfully hurt demand for the vehicles.Musk told investors on an earnings call last month that the time he allocates to Doge "will drop significantly" and that he would be "allocating far more of my time to Tesla".

Activists have called for Tesla boycotts, staging protests outside Tesla dealerships, and vandalising the vehicles and charging stations.The Tesla blowback became so violent and widespread that US Attorney General Pam Bondi warned her office would treat acts of vandalism as "domestic terrorism".