zlacker

It’s just my opinion but I think the meme you’re talking about is deeply related to other branches of science and philosophy: ranging from the trust old saw about AI being anything a computer hasn’t done yet to deep meditations on the nature of consciousness.

They’re all fundamentally anthropocentric: people argue until they are blue in the face about what “intelligent” means but it’s always implicit that what they really mean is “how much like me is this other thing”.

Language models, even more so than the vision models that got them funded have empirically demonstrated that knowing the probability of two things being adjacent in some latent space is at the boundary indistinguishable from creating and understanding language.

I think the burden is on the bright hominids with both a reflexive language model and a sex drive to explain their pre-Copernican, unique place in the theory of computation rather than vice versa.

A lot of these problems just aren’t problems anymore if performance on tasks supersedes “consciousness” as the thing we’re studying.

>>benree+(OP)
I'd argue that there is probably at least one leap in terms of human-level writing which isn't just pure prediction. Humans write with intent, which is how we can maintain long run structure. I definitely write like GPT while I'm not paying attention, but with the executive on the task I outperform it. For all we know this is solvable with some small tweak to architecture, and I rather doubt that a model which has solved this problem need be conscious (though our own solution seems correlated with consciousness), but it is one more step.

>>ravi-d+lc
I agree that intent is the missing piece so far. GTP can respond better to prompts than most people, but does so with a complete lack of intent. The human provides 100% of it.