[ghaff]

>My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in.

The success of machine learning/neural nets--in no small part because of the amount of computation resources we can throw at them--has really led to hogging the attention compared to fields like cognitive science, neurophysiology, and so forth. Work is certainly going on in other areas but I'm still struck that some of the questions that were being asked when I took brain science as an undergrad many decades ago (e.g. how do we recognize a face as a face?) are still being asked today.

Given that ML is the thing that's getting the flashy results, it's not surprising it's the thing in a limelight--even if there's a suspicion that it maybe (probably?) only gets you so far without better understanding how learning happens in people (and other animals) and other aspects of thinking and intelligence.

[goatlover]

It's likely also the case that brains don't work the way LLMs do. After-all, we evolved to survive and reproduce in the real world, not generate text or images. I consider AI to be a kind of alien intelligence that approximates human intelligence in some ways, and supersedes it in others (where computing power can be fully leveraged such as AlphaGo being able to play itself a million times in a few hours).