Personally, I think it's doing language, but I don't consider language general intelligence in humans. It's one particularly useful trick of dividing things into discrete symbols and pushing around the abstract discrete symbols. It's a co-processor in human reasoning; to make an analogy with computers, it's such a great trick that it's implemented in hardware, but it's not the general reasoning ability itself.

It exhibits the weaknesses of that mode of thought in humans; over-confidence, generating nonsense, etc. People have thoughts, make gestures that indicate they had the correct thought, pass it off for lexing and transmission to language bits of the brain, then process can go off the rails, and they say something different than what they think, and we know they hd the right thought by the gesture they made. We also don't know what we'll say until we say it; I can believe it quite likely that we're also kind of building nearly one word at a time with a statistical model.

I'm actually saddened that people don't recognize in themselves that this thing occurring in themselves is not real thought or intelligence even without something like GPT4 around.

The main reason I don't think it's AGI is because I don't think it's GI in humans, but I think it's doing something pretty similar to one thing we do.

I think humans are capable of GI, they just typically don't run in that mode, they run in probabilistic predictions mode like LLM's, without realizing it.

> Anyone who tells you that these models are "just glorified text generators" is flat out wrong and hasn't bothered to do their homework

What homework.. if i may ask a dumb question?

My very limited understanding was such that this is a glorified text generator - however, it seems what is possible with text generation is allowing unexpected levels of competence and utility. To be clear, i agree with you that it's functionality is impressive and deep. However i had figured one area of research is in the very premise of "How good can LLMs without intelligence be?".

Is that wrong in your view?

(again, i'm not making a statement. I know next to nothing in this space. I just try to reach a layman's understanding on this subject and i use GPT4 daily)

Homework as in:

1. Actually hands on testing the AI to verify that it can't do the things you claim or believe it can't do.

2. Review of the current literature where these LLMs have actually been tested rigorously for various emergent capabilities.

Its rhetorical, as it makes the case that a human is also a glorified text generator. I.e. it's a meaningless statement to say something is a "glorified text generator".

So a highly intelligent AI that produces text is glorified, whatever that means...

It has been shown multiple times that it is incapable of doing math with any consistency. It does not understand numbers, it just knows where numbers usually show up.

> How good can LLMs without intelligence be?

after this LLM breakthrough a lot of smart people started questioning what intelligence really is.

I was extremely skeptical, but after playing with these things and listening to discussions held by their creators, I'm fairly convinced that this is intelligence-adjacent. In the same sense that there must be thoughts an organic brain can't think, there are types of intelligence that don't map exactly onto ours. Vaguely like Feynman's peculiary methods of doing integrals - his method was different, so he could solve things unsolvable by people with standard methods.

The “true experts” barely know more than we do. They are using black-box techniques to evaluate GPT-4. They have no theory as to why things are working as they appear to.

You are trying to make the case for something astounding but you are being careful to not make any actual claims. Yes we are closer to AGI than we thought, but that does not imply close. The delta is smaller than it's ever been, but name any period in history where we were further from AGI at the end of that period than at the beginning. You are trying to imply that we are significantly closer, but aren't willing to say that or claim that that is the consensus.

Again, saying they are not 'glorified text generators' is not a claim at all. They are glorified text generators, and of course they are more interesting than previous text generators, the question you are avoiding here is the actually significant one, which you demure on and try to lead us onto unfounded conclusions based on other people also not being willing to stick their neck out and make any claims.

> I think the consensus at this point is that these models are much closer to AGI than anyone thought they could or should be

Maybe closer, but not close. For one thing, these things don't even continuously think. Would you call a human "conscious" if it only existed as soon as a question had been asked of it, lived for the sole purpose of responding, and went braindead immediately after answering?

It micro-sleeps. As far as the AI knows no time passes during the periods when it's not answering. And it experiences a form of amnesia when the chat is over. A "50 first dates" bot. Bing reports that it does have both a wall clock and some form of processing metric it can "see" though (this seems to be consistent though it could be hallucinating).

A more serious omission is a lack of continuous inner dialog. Bing has the #inner-monologue tag but all of the AI's language based thought happens out in the open for the most part, and it doesn't have any time to process or ponder what's been said.

Of course that can be remedied somewhat by putting the AI in "ponder-bot" mode, where you can tell it to write out it's thoughts privately while you "pause". Both Bing and GPT will ponder if you ask them to and write an inner monologue if you give it time and ask it to shield it's dialog with some privacy.

It's interesting what Bing or GPT will reveal about their thoughts when in "ponder-bot" mode. Bing (at least in my trials) will only tell you generally what it hid from you in its private thoughts but the times I've tried to pry Bing ends the chat, and GPT will usually reveal them if you ask.