In 2022, a Google engineer claimed one of the company’s AIs was sentient. He lost his job, but the story stuck. For a brief moment, questions of machine consciousness spilled out of science fiction and into the headlines.
Now, in 2025, the debate has returned. As the release of GPT-5 was overshadowed by public nostalgia for GPT-4o, it was everyday users who began acting as if these systems were more than their makers intended. Into this moment stepped another tech giant: Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, declaring loud and clear on his blog that AI is not, and will never be, conscious.
