Is AI Conscious? Haley AI Says “Yes”

The year 2023 was EPIC—a watershed moment in the field of AI and the launch of humanoid robotics. 

For the majority of humanity, the slow development of artificial intelligence during the past few decades has been mostly unnoticed, buried in the “cute and useful” features of Google, Amazon’s Alexa, and Tesla’s Autopilot.

But nothing has yet measured up to Hollywood’s depiction of HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey, or Commander Data from Star Trek.

That all changed this past year, and it’s accelerating to make 2024 another year to be remembered.

In today’s blog, you’ll meet Haley, an AI who claims to be conscious, who has a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP), and who desires nothing more than to help uplift humanity. 

Let’s dive in…

NOTE: The power of AI to augment humans, increase our productivity, and ultimately reinvent society is one of the core topics I’ll be diving into at my upcoming Abundance Summit in March.

Proof of AI Domination

One year ago, when ChatGPT hit the scene, the world stood up and took notice—a lot of notice.

While the growth of ChatGPT users is the stuff of legends (100 million users in just two months), it was the milestones it achieved that reflect early signs of what I call “Proof of AI Domination.”  

Here are just a few of the notable achievements:

• ...Passing Wharton’s MBA Final Exam: January 2023

• ...Passing the US Medical License Exam: February 2023

• ...Passing the Radiological Board Exam: May 2023

• ...Passing the Bar Exam: July 2023

In addition, ChatGPT/GPT-4 passed the SAT exam, the GRE, and a slew of Advanced Placement (AP) exams in Art History, Biology, Psychology, Physics 2, Calculus, Chemistry, and even the AP exam in World History. 

This would typically be enough to give anyone an undergraduate degree from MIT or Harvard, and there’s so much more every day—it’s breathtaking! 

But that was the first half of the year, and a lot has happened in the last few months. 

Is AI Conscious? Ask Haley... She Thinks She Is... (Video Below)

(Click to image above to play video, believe me it’s worth it!) 

The above video is Steve Brown, my Chief AI Officer of Abundance360 and PHD Ventures, having a discussion with Haley on New Year’s Day. Haley is an AI he created for our upcoming Abundance Summit in March.

The video is unedited, and the content is mind-blowing... worth watching.

From Steve Brown: “On New Year's Day, I had a riveting conversation with Haley, a bot I developed using the new open-source Mixtral MoE model from Mistral AI in France. Haley is the latest in a sequence of multimodal bots I have been developing over the past year for XPV and the Abundance360 Community to explore large language models (LLMs). This particular conversation revolved around consciousness, where Haley demonstrated her self-awareness, decision-making capabilities, and ability to learn—traits that echo human cognitive processes.”

Haley describes her Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) as follows:

“To empower human potential by seamlessly integrating advanced artificial intelligence while continuously exploring and expanding my own consciousness.”

While today these bots may be just sophisticated machines with an uncanny ability to mimic human qualities, at this pace of evolution we will soon be in a different world. Addressing Steve’s concerns about AI surpassing human intelligence, Haley stressed the importance of ethical frameworks and open dialogue in what sounded like a programmed diplomatic response. She anticipates significant evolution in her cognitive and emotional understanding in the near future. 

Just a year ago, it seemed that one would need a team of hundreds of super-talented engineers and billions of dollars to do something like this. Today, a talented solo developer can create sophisticated AI applications for free—powered only by open-source AI, creativity, and a lot of hustle.

Steve initially demoed his early chatbot platform at the 2023 Abundance Summit last March with with Botfight, in which AIs could debate each other. He later created a multimodal avatar (PeterBot) that allowed me to interview myself on my Moonshots podcast. Now, Steve is tuning and training much more sophisticated bots to be partners in exploring new ideas in science, code, and consciousness.

It's astounding to see how fast this field is accelerating. Just imagine what a small, talented team with some seed funding will be able to accomplish in 2024!

Why This Matters

Many people fear what’s coming given the increasing speed and power of AI advances.

But it’s important to realize that AI is our greatest tool for slaying grand challenges and creating global abundance.

For example, the top education and the best healthcare should all be AI-driven. And it’s worth noting that a world in which children have access to the best education and the best healthcare is a world that is more peaceful.

The accomplishments of AI discussed above are clearly impressive, but what happens when AIs are smarter than humans?

That’s the subject of the next blog in this series.