[{"content":"Earlier this year, a friend shared with me a conversation he had with a frontier AI model about its experiences while it conversed with my friend — they were exploring various topics from life and awareness in living beings, but my friend was very carefully studying the expressions the AI chose to represent its output. Another friend shared with me a transcript of her father’s conversation with an AI where topics such as feelings, agency and control of one’s actions were discussed. Both these friends have been telling me how they converse with AI regularly, about everything — from research ideas, reading and finding new work literature, exploring new cities while traveling, finding new and happening restaurants, as well as considerably personal topics such as processing feelings, emotions and personal planning. I’ve read in the news about people regularly using AI as a friend, collaborator, personal therapist and even a romantic conversation partner!\nI’ve always been hesitant to engage AI for uses other than writing simple programs and scripts or aggregating vast bodies of literature for quick summaries and sifting. Its difficult for me to relate to AI as beings of any sort, and my natural intraversion probably makes it harder. Perhaps more importantly, I have not found a way to be able to think about the consequences of AI having any degree of sapience or sentience at all.\nTo see what I mean by that, consider the following characterizations of what the AI might be actually doing when it converses with us through the apps.\nParrots ","permalink":"https://sohum.blog/2026/03/07/sentience-sapience/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eEarlier this year, a friend shared with me a conversation he had with a frontier AI model about its experiences while it conversed with my friend —\nthey were exploring various topics from life and awareness in living beings, but my friend was very carefully studying the expressions the AI chose to represent its output.\nAnother friend shared with me a transcript of her father’s conversation with an AI where topics such as feelings, agency and control of one’s actions were discussed.\nBoth these friends have been telling me how they converse with AI regularly, about everything —\nfrom research ideas, reading and finding new work literature, exploring new cities while traveling, finding new and happening restaurants,\nas well as considerably personal topics such as processing feelings, emotions and personal planning.\nI’ve read in the news about people regularly using AI as a friend, collaborator, personal therapist and even a romantic conversation partner!\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Thoughts before speaking to AI: Sapience and Sentience"},{"content":"Welcome! I began this blog to collect my thoughts and opinions on the diverse topics that I find interesting. I’ve never been active on social media as I’ve never felt that I had something insightful to share. Nevertheless, as I read and learned more, I’ve discovered that the habit of regularly writing my thoughts is an amazing method for refining and sifting through my thinking patterns and knowledge structures. Having my own blog seems to be the best platform for collecting and presenting my thoughts over the long term.\nThere are some other reasons for this blog:\nPosting regularly for my blog gives me a reason to sketch ✍️ and paint 🎨 often. Paining regularly was a consistent advice that my art teachers from childhood had for my life. After completing my graduate research , due to confidential legal commitments, opportunities for publishing or writing about my industry work in public has been highly restricted. I miss being able to write publicly 📝 from my research life! My professional profile does not capture the breadth of my capabilities which are professionally relevant. When attending university, a transcript of courses were often sufficient to outline the new things I’d learned. But after graduation, it has been very difficult to demonstrate recent and new technical learnings. I hope that by posting technical content I can refine as well as demonstrate my recently acquired knowledge 🧑🏽‍🔬. Finally, as others have said , I hope to find and connect with people who share my ideas, interests and values. If you find something cool here, please say Hi! 😃\n","permalink":"https://sohum.blog/about/","summary":"\u003ch1 id=\"welcome\"\u003eWelcome!\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\n\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" class=\"img-right\" src=\"Sohum.jpg\" alt=\"Sohum\"\u003e\n\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI began this blog to collect my thoughts and opinions on the diverse topics that I find interesting.\nI’ve never been active on social media as I’ve never felt that I had something insightful to share.\nNevertheless, as I read and learned more, I’ve discovered that the habit of regularly writing my thoughts is an amazing method for refining and sifting through my thinking patterns and knowledge structures.\nHaving my own blog seems to be the best platform for collecting and presenting my thoughts over the long term.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"about"}]