This explains nothing. Stating it's an emergent phenomenon gives us just as much information as saying it's magic. Arguably even less, because it sounds like an explanation, whereas "magic" doesn't pretend to explain anything.
> displaying emergent behaviours that couldn't have been predicted beforehand.
Same problem here. You say "couldn't have been predicted". Which is only true if you explain it away with emergence. The behaviours weren't predicted, because we don't understand how these networks work. Saying they couldn't have been predicted implies that we can't understand them. Which is a very bold statement and I'm fairly certain that it's not true.
I don't think that's the case. Of course at one level we can understand how GPT4 works, we have a working implementation of it after all. But that doesn't help us predict how it will behave, because its properties are emergent, and have to be studied separately at that level. That's not saying it's magic.
Reality can be unsatisfying because it does not owe us explanations.
I mean, you experienced the reality of consciousness while talking about the last digit of 22/7.
If there is anything in our world that needs explaining it’s consciousness.
Reality doesn’t owe us an explanation of consciousness (obviously). We owe it to ourselves though.
That is not at all quite plain. Respectable philosophical views include the proposition it is at least as fundamental as space or time.
Dismissing serious ideas with thousands of years of philosophical history behind them as "magic thinking" is either a failure of imagination or education; you can rectify the latter by reading up on the subject.
Edit: I wonder if there are studies that have determined whether or not new born infants are self aware or does it take time for it to emerge after the brain has been trained on its environment for a while
The reason recent results are significant in this discussion is because:
- Larger networks are already displaying emergent behaviours that couldn't have been predicted beforehand. It doesn't have to be 'human-like' intelligence for that to be significant.
- We're getting close to a point where our models will start exhibiting something of the order of the same level of intelligence of primitive creatures.
So the wide-eyed hysteria you're seeing is really just new data points confirming what many of us always assumed would be the case.