[krickkrack]

I read this and can't help but chuckle... To say that we are nowhere being able to have AGI is quite a bold statement. It was after all only a few months ago where many people also believed we were a long way away from ChatGPT-4.

The confidence with which you think we are not weighted transformers or statistical inference models is also puzzling. How could you possibly know that? How do you know that that's not precisely what we are, or something immediately tangent to that?

Perhaps if you keep going you do get something that begins to have feeling, religion and understand that it's a self and perhaps that's precisely what happened to humans.

[agentultra]

Ah yes, the old: you can’t prove my deity doesn’t exist argument.

Puzzling that I don’t share your faith or point of view? Why?

The point is to not ascribe properties attributed to a thing we know doesn’t have them. We can teach people how ChatGPT works without getting into pseudo-philosophical babble about what consciousness is and whether humans can be accurately simulated by an LLM with enough parameters.

[myrmidon]

IMO the big blindside of your argument is that you MUST either accept that some magic happens in human brains (=> which is HARD to reconciliate with a science-inspired world-view), OR that achieving human-level cognitive performance is a pure hardware/software optimization problem.

The thing is that GPT4 already approaches human level cognitive performance in some tasks, which means you need a strong argument for WHY full human-level performance would be out of reach of gradual improvements to the current approach.

On the other hand, a very strong argument could be made that the very first artificial neural networks had the absolutely right ideas and all the improvements over the last ~40 years were just the necessary scaling/tuning for actually approaching human performance levels...

This is also where I have to recommend V Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology" (from 1984!) which aged remarkably well and shaped my personal outlook on the human mind more than anything else.

[krickkrack]

What faith? I never made the claim you're attributing to me. Smug idiots like you are wrong all the time.