[pontus]

One (perhaps silly) way I like to frame this stuff is by imagining that I'm some special purpose Turing machine designed specifically for some task. Sure, sometimes other Turing machines come along that appear to infringe upon my skill set but they ultimately only perform a small subtask better than I am able to (e.g. calculator, spell check, word processor, IDE, code completion, ...). So, I incorporate it into my routine, effectively boosting my own performance.

Now, what would happen if all of a sudden a universal Turing machine came along? Well, by virtue of being universal, that means that it can emulate me and all other Turing machines. This time around things are different. Even if I can find a way to incorporate it into my workflow, it can still emulate that more sophisticated version of me by virtue of being universal. So it then comes down to whether or not I can incorporate the latest version of this universal Turing machine faster than its own design is improved. If not, I will be replaced. Since in our instantiation, I am made from biological material it's in my mind only a matter of time before the universal Turing machine starts outpacing me.

So, I guess the question is then if these GPT models (or their descendants) are universal (in my hand wavy definition of the term).

[daveguy]

You are misunderstanding / misusing "universal Turing machine" ... Computers have have been universal Turing machines aka Turing complete approximately since computers were invented.

You seem to be confusing UTM with Artificial General Intelligence. Universal Turing Machine is not the term for some magic machine that can interpret and integrate any observed computation. LLMs will significantly change how we interact with computers, but the ability to emulate another turing machine has always been there (for computers and yes, LLMs with memory are turning complete). That doesn't mean AGI can be implemented efficiently or that LLMs are sufficient for AGI.

[pontus]

No I'm just it as an analogy. Not all Turing machines are universal.

What were going through now could maybe be likened to what it would be like for a Turing machine to encounter a universal Turing machine for the first time. For all its life this fictitious Turing machine has encountered other non-universal Turing machines and have simply incorporated them into their own process. When they then encounter their first universal Turing machine they would possibly not be too concerned since each time before they have always just been able to use the new machine to make themselves more productive. However, this time it's different.

My point is just that while it may very well have been true in all of history that new tools have just made us more productive than before rather than fully replace us, this won't be the case for AGI. It's not just another tool we can add to our arsenal but instead something than can subsume us entirely much like how a universal Turing machine can emulate any other Turing machine.