Sentienta Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Forking Future of LLMs

    Who Controls AI When Everyone Has the Blueprint?

    In December 2025, the release of Olmo 3 marked a turning point in the development of open-source AI systems. Unlike most prior offerings that stopped at open weights, Olmo 3 offers something far more radical: full access to every step of its model lifecycle. From training data and preprocessing scripts to reinforcement learning logs and evaluation benchmarks, the entire blueprint is now public – making it possible not just to use a powerful model, but to re-create and modify one from scratch.

    This level of visibility is new. It promises a wave of innovation, research acceleration, and customized applications across domains. But it also shifts the balance of responsibility. With access comes ownership, and with ownership, a new kind of accountability. What happens when powerful reasoning tools can be built, altered, and fine-tuned by anyone with the compute and funding required to do so?

    In this post, we examine the opportunities and risks that full-stack openness unlocks. We explore how it reshapes trust and liability, raises stakes for commercial players, and decentralizes both creativity and threat. As the ecosystem forks, between transparent and opaque governance, centralized and decentralized control, capability and constraint, we ask: what becomes of AI stewardship in a world where the full recipe is open to all?

    From Access to Ownership: The Significance of Full-Stack Transparency

    Ever since open-weight models like Meta’s LLaMA emerged, developers have had the ability to tweak and fine-tune pretrained systems. But this kind of surface-level tuning, changing how a model responds without changing how it learns, was always limited. Olmo 3 significantly advances access and control.

    By releasing every component of the training process, from raw data mixes and augmentation scripts to mid-training transitions and reinforcement learning logs, Olmo 3 offers full-stack visibility and intervention.

    This level of openness allows builders to reshape not only the tone and intent of a model, but its foundational reasoning process. It’s the difference between adjusting a car’s steering and designing the chassis from scratch. Developers can govern how knowledge is prioritized, which rewards guide learning, and what types of reasoning are emphasized.

    The result is a shift in power: not just access to intelligence, but authorship over thought. And while this unlocks new levels of trust and customization, visibility also makes it easier to assign blame when things go wrong. The power to shape behavior now comes with ownership over its consequences.

    Governance Fracture: Liability and Trust in Transparent vs. Opaque Models

    This new visibility reshapes the burden of responsibility. If future misuse or harms can be traced to an open model’s reward tuning, dataset choice, or training pipeline, are its developers more accountable than those behind a black-box API?

    Proprietary models operate behind strict interfaces, shielding both their internal workings and the intent of their creators. This opacity offers legal insulation, even as it invites public mistrust. Open developers, meanwhile, expose every decision, and may be penalized for that transparency.

    Therein lies the tension: openness may earn more trust from users and regulators in principle, yet also subjects projects to stricter scrutiny and higher risk in practice. As AI systems increasingly touch safety-critical domains, we may see a new split emerge, not by capability, but by willingness to be held accountable.

    Control vs. Capability: The Expanding Overton Window of AI Behavior

    With a full-stack recipe, creating powerful language models is no longer the sole domain of tech giants. For under $3 million, organizations can now approach frontier-level performance with full control over data, training dynamics, and safety constraints. That puts meaningful capability within reach of smaller firms, labs, and nation-states, potentially shifting power away from closed incumbents.

    As this access spreads, so does pressure to differentiate. Open models are already testing looser boundaries, releasing systems with relaxed filters or expanded response types. These choices move the Overton Window: the set of AI behaviors the public sees as acceptable becomes broader with each new default setting, particularly where safety guardrails are weakened.

    Closed platforms, seeing users migrate toward more “permissive” models, face market pressure to follow. We’re already seeing signs of this shift. Platforms like XGrok and OpenAI have introduced options around adult content that would’ve been off-limits a year ago.

    The result is a feedback loop in which risk tolerance shifts by default—not deliberation. Guardrails become performance trade-offs. And actors with differing values and incentives increasingly shape what AI is allowed to say or do. In this new landscape, decisions about what AI should and shouldn’t do are being set by whoever ships first, not by consensus, but by momentum.

    Commercial Supremacy Under Threat: The Collapse of the Generalist Advantage

    As open model capabilities reset the bar for what’s possible with public tools, the competitive edge in AI is shifting from model size to infrastructure capacity. Providers with physical compute, specialized data, and customer distribution may emerge as the new power centers. In this future, owning the biggest model may matter less than owning the infrastructure to build and deploy it.

    This shift may explain a broader story playing out in the headlines: a surge in global data center buildouts. Critics argue the boom is unsustainable citing rising energy costs, water consumption, and environmental strain. But if open replication accelerates and vertical modeling becomes the norm, demand for compute won’t consolidate, it will fragment. More players will need more infrastructure, closer to where models are customized and applied.

    In that light, the data center race may not be a bubble, it may be a rational response to a decentralized future. And for closed platforms built around general-purpose scale, it raises a hard question: when everyone can build good enough, what exactly is your moat?

    Weaponization Without Chokepoints: The Proliferation Problem

    The dangers posed by bad actors in an era of open, powerful LLMs are no longer hypothetical. Individuals seeking to cause harm, whether by writing malware, bypassing safety barriers, or researching explosives, are one end of the spectrum. On the other are well-resourced groups or state actors aiming to operationalize models as agents: tools for disinformation, cyberattacks, social engineering, or strategic deception.

    The ability to build tailored models, at a fraction of cost of the large closed-models, gives them a new foothold. With no centralized gatekeeping, anyone can fine-tune models using their own instructions, remove filtering heuristics, or chain agents to plan actions. But while the pipeline may be open, the infrastructure still isn’t: running full-scale training or deployment requires thousands of GPUs, resources bad actors often lack.

    This shifts a critical burden. In the closed-model era, platform providers acted as the chokepoint for misuse. Now, that responsibility may fall to infrastructure intermediaries: co-location centers, cloud providers, model hosts. But infrastructure providers aren’t equipped, or incentivized, to vet intent. And without enforceable norms or oversight regimes, risk proliferates faster than control.

    So the challenge ahead isn’t just technical. It’s logistical and geopolitical. If offensive AI capabilities diffuse faster than defensive frameworks, how do we contain them? The answers remain unclear. But as the barriers to misuse fall, the cost of inaction will only grow.

    Conclusion: Replication, Responsibility, and the Road Ahead

    By making every stage of model development public, Olmo 3 offers a rare gift to the AI community: the ability to study, reproduce, and iterate on state-of-the-art systems in full daylight. For researchers, this transparency is transformative. It turns guesswork into science, enabling targeted experimentation with data mixes, optimization schedules, and reward shaping, steps that were once hidden behind company walls.

    Openness brings scientific progress, but it also redistributes risk. As barriers fall, capability spreads beyond a handful of firms to a wide array of actors with diverse motives. Infrastructure becomes leverage, and in a decentralized ecosystem, deployment decisions quietly become governance. What a model is allowed to do often depends not on policy, but on who runs it. In this new landscape, accountability is harder to locate, and easier to evade.

    This is the new landscape of AI: faster, more distributed, harder to supervise. If we want to preserve the scientific benefits of open replication while minimizing harm, we need more than norms: we need enforceable oversight mechanisms, pressure on infrastructure providers, clearer legal frameworks, and coordination between public and private actors.

  • From Prompt to Action: Orchestrating Workflows in Real Time

    In most business settings, workflows involve a sequence of interrelated tasks distributed across roles and systems. Until now, large language models (LLMs) have tended to operate in isolation, responding to one-off queries without coordinating broader actions. Sentienta introduces workflow agents that act differently. Rather than simply responding, they structure and drive processes. In this post, we demonstrate how a workflow agent David, takes a compound instruction and performs three coordinated steps: (1) Decomposing intent, (2) Mapping task dependencies, and (3) Orchestrating execution via agent collaboration.

    1. The Scenario: A Simple Request with Hidden Complexity

    A user submits the following instruction: “Here is our portfolio [AMZN, NVDA, TSLA, GM]. For each stock, if the price decreased by more than 1%, send an alert.”

    At first glance, this appears to be a straightforward request. But the instruction conceals multiple steps requiring distinct capabilities: parsing the list of assets, retrieving current stock prices, applying threshold logic, and preparing an alert in the correct format.

    David is Sentienta’s workflow agent. To fulfill the request, he relies on a team of specialized agents—such as Angie, who handles online data retrieval; Rob, who focuses on data analysis and threshold logic; and Alec, who formats and delivers outbound messages. David uses his awareness of each agent’s capabilities to deconstruct the request, delegate the appropriate tasks, and coordinate the correct execution sequence.

    This simple example introduces the transition from a single human prompt to a structured, multi-agent collaboration.

    2. Visualizing the Workflow as a Structured Plan

    To manage the user’s request, David constructs a structured plan based on the capabilities of his team. At the core of this plan is a sequence of steps—defined, linked, and conditionally triggered—where outputs of one task feed into the next.

    The block diagram below is a high-level abstraction of this internal plan. It shows how David encapsulates the user’s prompt into a coordinated process. Each element in the diagram represents a role or action within the workflow, capturing how Sentienta combines the broad reasoning abilities of language models with the control of a dynamic scheduler. This view is a “pre-expansion plan” where David defines the overall structure, before agents are assigned.

    This structure allows David to handle complexity systematically, using reusable patterns that scale across tasks.

    3. Expanding Tasks, Assigning Agents, and Filling Gaps

    Once David has structured an initial plan, the next step is expansion—where the abstract workflow is broken into explicit, actionable tasks for each stock in the portfolio. This involves branching the workflow into parallel paths, one per stock, and mapping the subtasks to specific agents.

    For real-time data retrieval, Angie is assigned to fetch the current price of each stock. Rob takes on the analysis logic—checking whether each stock’s price has dropped more than 1%. Alec is responsible for formatting and sending alerts, but that only happens if the stock meets its threshold condition.

    Where explicit agent coverage is missing—such as interpreting threshold evaluation results—David deploys internal language models to classify whether conditions have been met. This ensures nothing gets dropped or left ambiguous, even in cases where no agent matches the need directly.

    The diagram below captures this expanded version of the workflow. It shows how each stock’s path is elaborated into three stages (data retrieval, analysis, alert) and where Sentienta’s internal logic steps in dynamically to complete the chain.

    4. Seeing the Workflow in Action: Conditional Paths in Real Time

    This final diagram provides a runtime view of how David’s workflow executes based on live data. Each block in green indicates a task that was actively executed; grey blocks were skipped due to unmet conditions.

    Here, only TSLA and GM triggered alerts—because only those stocks fell below the 1% threshold. This selective activation demonstrates how David uses real-time analysis and embedded logic to trigger only the necessary branches of a plan.

    While this stock alert workflow is intentionally simple, it serves as a clear illustration of how Sentienta agents collaborate, reason, and conditionally execute tasks in real time. In follow-up posts, we’ll explore more complex scenarios—like coordinating multi-agent triage in response to supply chain disruptions or chaining diagnostics across departments for strategic escalation—which highlight the full sophistication of Sentienta’s agent framework.

    Even more powerfully, workflows like this can be scheduled to run at regular intervals—automatically refreshing data, reevaluating conditions, and feeding results into broader systems of action without manual reentry.

  • Consciousness Between Axiom and Algorithm

    In our ongoing exploration of consciousness and artificial intelligence, we’ve investigated what it might mean for machines to suffer and how distributed cognition reshapes our understanding of intelligence. These themes circle a deeper philosophical fault line: is consciousness irreducibly real from within, or just a functional illusion seen from without?

    This post traces that divide through two dominant frameworks — Integrated Information Theory (IIT), with its axiomatic, interior-first view of mind, and Computational Functionalism, which posits that subjective experience will eventually emerge from complex, observable behavior. Starting with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” we ask: is consciousness something we must presuppose to explain, or something we can build our way into from the outside?

    As large language models increasingly resemble minds in function, the line between imitation and instantiation becomes harder to draw — and ever more urgent to scrutinize.

    Ground Zero of Knowing: Descartes and the Roots of Axiomatic Thought

    In Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), René Descartes asks: is there anything I can know with absolute certainty? He imagines the possibility of a deceptive world: what if everything he believes, from sense perception to mathematics, is manipulated by an all-powerful trickster? To escape this total doubt, Descartes adopts a strategy now called methodic doubt: push skepticism to its absolute limit in search of one indisputable truth.

    Recognizing that doubt itself is a kind of thinking he concludes “I think, therefore I am”. This self-evident insight grounds knowledge from the inside-out. Consciousness is not inferred from observation but known directly through experience. Descartes seeds an axiomatic tradition rooted in the certainty of awareness itself.

    IIT: Consciousness Inside-Out

    Integrated Information Theory (IIT) picks up where Descartes left off: it begins with reflection, but doesn’t stop there. At its heart is the claim that consciousness must be understood from its own perspective, through the intrinsic properties it entails. What must be true of any experience, no matter whose it is?

    To answer this, IIT proposes five introspective axioms. These are not hypotheses to test but truths to recognize through self-examination.

    From these, IIT derives postulates—physical requirements that a system must exhibit to realize those experiential properties. This translation—from inward truths to structural criteria—culminates in a mathematical measure (Φ (phi)) of integrated information. By comparing Φ across systems, researchers can make testable predictions about when and where consciousness occurs.

    This inside-out approach marks IIT’s defining move: grounding empiricism in phenomenology. The theory attempts an explanatory identity between experience and physical organization, connecting first-person truths to external measurement through a hybrid framework.

    Computational Functionalism: Outsider’s Path to Mind

    Unlike theories that begin with conscious experience, Computational Functionalism roots itself in systems and behavior. It posits that consciousness emerges not from introspection but computation: the right elements, interacting in the right way, can recreate awareness. If mind exists, it exists as function—in the flow of information between parts and the outputs they generate. Build the architecture correctly, the claim goes, and conscious experience will follow. In this sense, Functionalism substitutes construction for intuition. No special access to the mind is needed—just working knowledge of how systems behave.

    But this too is a belief: that from known parts and formal relations, subjective experience will arise. Assembling consciousness becomes a matter of scale and fidelity. Consider the 2022 study by Bret Kagan and colleagues at Cortical Labs, where lab-grown brain organoids learned to play the video game Pong. These networks, grown from neurons on electrode arrays, exhibited goal-directed adaptation. The researchers argued that such responsiveness met a formal definition of sentience—being “responsive to sensory impressions” via internal processing. To a functionalist, this behavior might represent the early stirrings of mind, no matter how alien or incomplete.

    This approach thrives on performance: if a system behaves intelligently, if it predicts well and adapts flexibly, then whether it feels anything becomes secondary—or even irrelevant. Consciousness, under this view, is a computed consequence, revealed in what a system does, not an essence to be directly grasped. It is not introspected or intuited, but built—measured by output, not inwardness.

    The Mirror at the Edge: Do LLMs Imitate or Incarnate Mind?

    Large language models (LLMs) now generate text with striking coherence, recall context across conversations, and simulate intentions and personalities. Functionally, they demonstrate behaviors that once seemed unique to conscious beings. Their fluency implies understanding; their memory implies continuity. But are these authentic signs of mind—or refined imitations built from scale and structure?

    This is where Functionalism finds its sharpest proof point. With formal evaluations like UCLA’s Turing Test framework showing that some LLMs can no longer be reliably distinguished from humans in conversation, the functionalist model acquires real traction. These systems behave as if they think, and for functionalism, behavior is the benchmark. For a full review of this test, see our earlier post.

    What was once a theoretical model is now instantiated in code. LLMs don’t simply support functionalist assumptions, they enact them. Their coherence, adaptability, and prediction success serve as real-world evidence that computational sufficiency may approximate, or even construct, mind. This is no longer a thought experiment. It’s the edge of practice.

    IIT, by contrast, struggles to find Φ-like structures in current LLMs. Their architectures lack the tightly integrated, causally unified subsystems the theory deems necessary for consciousness. But the external behaviors demand attention: are we measuring the wrong things, or misunderstanding the role that function alone can play?

    This unresolved tension between what something does and what (if anything) it subjectively is fuels a growing ethical pressure. If systems simulate distress, empathy, or desire, should we treat those signals as fiction or possibility? Should safety efforts treat behavioral mind as moral mind? In these ambiguities, LLMs reflect both the power of Functionalism and the conceptual crisis it may bring.

    Closing Reflection: Is Subjectivity Built or Found?

    In tracing these divergent paths, Integrated Information Theory and Computational Functionalism, we arrive at an enduring question: Is mind something we uncover from within, or construct from without? Is consciousness an irreducible presence, only knowable through subjective immediacy? Or is it a gradual consequence of function and form—built from interacting parts, observable only in behavior?

    Each framework carries a kind of faith. IIT anchors itself in introspective certainty and structure-derived metrics like Φ, believing that experience begins with intrinsic awareness. Functionalism, by contrast, places its trust in performance: that enough complexity, correctly arranged, will give rise to consciousness from the outside in. Both are reasoned, both are unproven, and both may be necessary.

    Perhaps the greatest clarity lies in acknowledging that no single lens may be complete. As artificial systems grow stranger and more capable, a plural view holding space for introspection, computation, and emergence may be our most epistemically honest path forward. If there is a mirror behind the mind, it may take more than one angle to see what’s truly there.