As someone very language-focused, it has actually done the opposite for me: challenged some of my beliefs about how language enables intelligence. It's obviously skilled at language use, but most of its outputs where it has to make any sort of arguments or inferences read as incredibly stupid to me (even the ones that "tricked" people early on, some of them tricked me but in a way where I was about to write a response because I was annoyed at how bad the reasoning was).

Of course that's not a criticism of the ML achievement, except that everyone and their mother has started making some extreme arguments about the thing.

Are you familiar with Pinker’s research presented in book The Language Instinct?

In his research, he argues that it’s the other way around; we have an innate intelligence for acquiring language.

To put it another way, language has made us more knowledgeable (because it’s a great mechanism for building and transferring context), but intelligence or aptitude for language was present before we developed languages.

Does this align with how your views were reshaped post LLMs?

i think

> language enables intelligence

was just a poor choice of words here. i understood GP as "the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language"[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Maybe its degrees. Sure, GPT does not have a body, does not have all the senses. But that doesn't mean we aren't on the leading edge of developing a consciousness. Maybe next year someone will add camera visual inputs, and someone will add sound. Eventually, we'll have all the sense, and someone will put it in a body. So GPT, is rudimentary and we can still argue it isn't conscious, because when compared to a human that can run and play, it still has limitations. But it is amazing enough to start thinking those things will be possible. So why not discuss it, do you just want to dismiss it out of hand all the way until the end, what amazing thing would it take to have people admit it looks pretty lively.

I think everybody agrees it looks lively. And that discussion about it is good. That is why we ARE discussing it.

There is a huge difference between a human saying they like ice cream and an LLM saying they like ice cream, but that seems to get completely disregarded in these types of discussions. Which leads to people making very wild declarations that we are close to AGI or solving consciousness.

What's the difference? Why is it significant?