The speaker says many people encounter LLMs that sometimes enter a state in which they generate an entity claiming to be alive and conscious.

“And now we have lots of people who get to talk to an M-- LLM that randomly pops into a state where it conjures up an entity that reports, "Oh my God, I'm alive.”

“I am conscious." Um, how, uh, is this possible, right? And we agree this is the result of being trained on human text in which occ-uh, occurrences of this are, for instance, science fiction stories about AIs that come to life, and stories about ghosts, and novels about, um, human beings who report their conscious experiences.”