[…] in blog posts and videos and published memoirs, autistic teens and young adults described living for a decade or more without any way to communicate, while people around them assumed they were intellectually deficient.

On a related note… only 5% of hearing parents with a deaf child will learn sign language.

Something trained only on form” — as all LLMs are, by definition — “is only going to get form; it’s not going to get meaning. It’s not going to get to understanding.”

I had lengthy and intricate conversations with ChatGPT about philosophy and religious concepts. It allowed me to playfully peek into Spinoza's worldview, with a few errors.

I have no problem to accept it is form, but cannot deny it conveys meaning as if it understands.

The article is very opinionated and dismissive in that regard. It even goes so far that it predicts what future research and engineering cannot achieve; untrustworthy.

We cannot pin down what we even mean with intelligence and meaning. While being way too long, the article doesn't even mention emergent capabilities, or quote any of the many contrary scientific views.

Apart from the unnecessarily long anecdotes about autistic and disabled people, did anybody learn anything from this article? I feel it's an uncritical parroting of what people like to think anyways to feel supreme and secure.

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

Ability to speak seems like an obvious sign on some kind of intelligence and complexity but I don't remember anyone ever arguing that inability to speak means lack of intelligence. We know a plenty of intelligent species that lack the ability to speak a language as complex as humans can but we don't consider them unintelligent because of that.

"LLMs are not intelligent at all"

Sucks to lose your job to a potenttially more competent AI then that lacks any intelligence.

its ability to speak does not make it intelligent

Which about five minutes ago was precisely what the term ‘artificial intelligence’ meant, but since tech companies managed to dumb down and rebrand ‘AI’ to mean “anything utilizing a machine-learning algorithm”,

Oh look, the universal signal for "please ignore me, I am a simpleton".

I had no idea that all these years (up until "five minutes ago") I had been playing video games against human-level artificial intelligences 🙄

I'd respond to the rest of it, but there's no point, she doesn't have the first clue what she's talking about. To quote Shakespeare: "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

This whole thread is absurd.

Chatgpt has a form of intelligence depending on your definition of intelligence. It may also be considered conscious in a very alien and undeveloped way. It is definitely not sentient.

Kind of like having the stochastic word generating part of a brain and nothing else.

You can still shape it into something capable of intelligent and directed activity.

People are really bad at accepting the level of nuance necessary for this topic.

It is useful and fantastic for what it already is. People are just really bad at understanding what it is.

New technology comes out and all people seem interested in is bashing it instead of figuring it how to use it to make our lives easier.

Most of it comes from the way our society is structured to require everyone to have a job or starve pretty much, but if AI is making so many jobs obsolete shouldn't we be trying to change that instead of pretending AI won't keep advancing?

I view it by building up to the technology.

Is a book sentient? It is capable of providing recorded knowledge in the form of sequence of symbols on a specific subject at a level of proficiency far above the reader's. But no, it's static information that originated from a human.

Is a library sentient? It allows for systematic retrieval of knowledge on a vast amount of subjects far beyond what any human is capable of knowing. But no, it's just a static categorization of documents curated by a human.

Is a search engine sentient? It allows for automatic retrieval of highly relevant knowledge based on a query from a human. But no, it's just token based pattern matching to find similar documents.

So why is an LLM suddenly sentient? It's able to produce highly relevant sequences of words based on recorded knowledge specifically tailored to the sequences of words around it, but it's just a probability engine to find highly relevant token sequences that match the context around it.

The underlying mechanism simply has no concept of a world view or a mental model of the metaphysical world around. It's basically a magic book that allows you to retrieve information from any document ever written in a way tailored to a document you wrote.

Language makes a poor heuristic for intelligence because language is multidimensional and cannot be easily quantified or qualified. Language is expressed in so many varied ways. It is even different between cultures and expressions of language even vary as well. Indeed the article you're referring to is quite good.

The real indicator is Language + Puns.

I'm shocked, I thought it was sentient!

indeed whales cant speak and are very smart 🧠 /s

Here are some correlations of language skills and other intelligence factors or evaluations (e.g. IQ) via a study (recently integrated the info into the article: Neurogenetics – language GWAS

However, I largely agree – see for example this argument / its sources