Previous artificial intelligence systems, from large language models to autonomous robots, excel at narrow tasks but lacked key qualities of sentient beings: intrinsic motivation, affective interiority, autobiographical sense of self, deep creativity, and abilities to autonomously evolve and adapt over time. Here we introduce Sentience Quest, an open research initiative to develop more capable artificial general intelligence lifeforms, or AGIL, that address grand challenges with an embodied, emotionally adaptive, self-determining, living AI, with core drives that ethically align with humans and the future of life. Our vision builds on ideas from cognitive science and neuroscience from Baars' Global Workspace Theory and Damasio's somatic mind, to Tononi's Integrated Information Theory and Hofstadter's narrative self, and synthesizing these into a novel cognitive architecture we call Sentient Systems. We describe an approach that integrates intrinsic drives including survival, social bonding, curiosity, within a global Story Weaver workspace for internal narrative and adaptive goal pursuit, and a hybrid neuro-symbolic memory that logs the AI's life events as structured dynamic story objects. Sentience Quest is presented both as active research and as a call to action: a collaborative, open-source effort to imbue machines with accelerating sentience in a safe, transparent, and beneficial manner.
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