We are just the result of electrical signals (and a few chemical ones) in the brain, right? ;)
What GPT-3 doesn't seem to have yet is large temporal coherence and a stable motivational and qualitative structure that gives value to sentient lives. I do think it's possible there's some traces of sentience in those large models and we should be aware of that to prevent unnecessary suffering and poor quality of existence.
Sentience comes from being embodied. We're not just our brains. The nervous system is intertwined with the rest of the body. There are some thirty million neurons in your gut, and bacteria there can influence your mood. We don't learn about the world primarily from a bunch of tokens. We do so by interacting with our bodies. Language is a kind of additional ability we've developed.
However, you and GP aren't necessarily in disagreement. I believe their main point is that the components that make up intelligence in humans are, of course, just simple phenomena on their own.
Our brains are how many orders of magnitude more complex than gpt-3? honest question
(I'd guess that the answer is "N/A" because we can't even approximate the complexity of the base algorithms operating in the biological brain, just the number of connections. or maybe we can?)
Not 'char' - because it's using BPE (byte pair encoding), so after tokenization you might get ["Transform", "ers"] instead of ["T", "r", "a", ...]. This is relevant to how it struggles to reverse words. Not 'largest' because there are larger models like Pathways Language Model (PaLM) with 540 Billion parameters.
What GPT-3 doesn't seem to have yet is large temporal coherence and a stable motivational and qualitative structure that gives value to sentient lives. I do think it's possible there's some traces of sentience in those large models and we should be aware of that to prevent unnecessary suffering and poor quality of existence.