[leereeves]

That emergence is precisely what I'm looking for evidence of.

Human beings evolved to eat and reproduce and yet here we are, building computers and inventing complex mathematical models of language and debating whether they're intelligent.

We're so far from the environment we evolved to solve that we've clearly demonstrated the ability to adapt.

ChatGPT doing well at a language task isn't demonstrating that same ability to adapt because that's the task it was designed and trained to do. ChatGPT doing something completely different would be the impressive example.

In short: I don't categorically reject the possibility that LLMs might become capable of more than being "statistics-based text generators", I simply require evidence.

[patrickas]

This paper from late last year shows that LLMs are not "just" stochastic parrots, but they actually build an internal model of the "world" that is not programmed in, just from trying to predict the next token.

https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2210.13382

PS: More research has been done since that confirmed and strengthened the conclusion.

[slowmovintarget]

Another poster shared a link to this paper last week for Theory of Mind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

We're seeing those other capabilities emerge; like being able to play chess though it's not been trained to do so. That is, these LLMs are displaying emergent abilities associated with reasoning.

These LLMs aren't R. Daneel Olivaw or R2D2 (which is what I think of when I think of the original term for AI, and what we took to calling AGI). We're closer to seeing the just-the-facts AIs we encounter in Blindsight. Intelligence without awareness.

Funny that we still have to use science fiction to make our comparisons because our philosophy of intelligence, mind, and consciousness are insufficient to speak on the matter clearly.