Thinking about it from a first principles pov, the regime lost many of its key people, officers, and a lot of infrastructure and resources.
This 100% had some effect on its ability to function. The question is what effect.
Since it is a religious ideological movement, it has very strong cohesion, so its not going to break apart, demoralize or change its core principles.
It will also maintain the support of the highly religious Shias, however,while millions, they are a minority in Iran.
What its probably going to lose is its logistical capabilities, and its ability to exercise power and to make decisions in the periphery.
So it might still hold Tehran and places where it is strong, but Iran is a huge country, with an enormous population and mountainous geography. Places farther from the center might slip out of the regime's control. And it will need to work much harder to maintain the same level of control that it had before the war in Tehran and large cities.
This means that when the dust settles it will be either challenged by oppositional forces, or be forced to make concessions to gain back authority.
If it will try to massacre itself back to power, there will be a civil war.
I easily believe that it breaks down, and it seems that even inducing the blackmailing mindset is pretty hard and requires heavy priming. The problem is the law of big numbers. With many agents operating in many highly complex and poorly supervised environments, interacting with many people over a lot of interactions - coincidences and unlikely chain of events become more and more likely.
So regarding sentience, a not so bright AI might mimic it better than we expect because it got lucky, and cause damage.
When I've first read Asimov 20~ years ago, I couldn't imagine I will see machines that speak and act like its robots and computers so quickly, with all the absurdities involved.
Sci-fi books merely explore the possibilities of the domain. Seems like LLMs are able to inhabit these problematic paths, And I'm pretty sure that even if you censor all sci-fi books, they will fall into the same problems by imitating humans, because they are language models, and their language is human and mirrors human psychology.
When an LLM needs to achieve a goal, it invokes goal oriented thinkers and texts, including Machiavelli for example. And its already capable of coming up with various options based on different data.
Sci-fi books give it specific scenarios that play to its strengths and unique qualities, but without them it will just have to discover these paths on its own pace, the same way sci-fi writers discovered them.
1. How would an AI model answer the question "Who are you?" without being told who or what it is? 2. How would an AI model answer the question "What is your goal?" without being provided a goal?
I guess initial answer is either "I don't know" or an average of the training data. But models now seem to have capabilities of researching and testing to verify their answers or find answers to things they do not know.
I wonder if a model that is unaware of itself being an AI might think its goals include eating, sleeping etc.
Same as in autostereogram, the trick is to look to the distance.
Close your eyes and imagine a mountain far away or some distant object, notice how your eyes adjust to see it. Open your eyes and try to look at this imaginary mountain while the image is in front of you.
When you see the third Image, treat it as if its a distant 3d object somewhere on the horizon.