Or you can say the opposite and claim that there is soul, creativity, or inspiration in everything, even in inanimate objects (basically panpsychism, in contrast to materialism). But regardless of what kind of monism you take, the advent of current statistical AI models forces us to reconsider the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, which forms the basis of liberal thought.

> But regardless of what kind of monism you take, the advent of current statistical AI models forces us to reconsider the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, which forms the basis of liberal thought.

Didn't we dispose of Cartesian dualism a long time ago? It may have been useful for disposing of superstitions which preceded it, but anyone who has observed the effects of a stroke or has taken a psychotropics understands that mind and body are not made of separate stuff, and I know of no modern system of thought that stipulates that as an axiom.

LLMs just demonstrate that emergent information structures at the complexity of human language need not be only biological.

To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence.

Not just that LLMs are very capable by themselves, but significantly improve speech and image models.

We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language.

Vocal communication isn’t unique to humans, a new theory should be more broadly applicable to non human and non vocal languages.

I’m excited to see what big questions will be answered, and what new questions arise.

>We’ll need to break out of the Chomsky hierarchies and develop some new theories of language.

We might need to develop some "new theories of language", covering other areas, but why exactly do you think we'd need to "break out of the Chomsky hierarchies"?

Nothing about LLMs challenges Chomsky hierarchies.

They do challenge Chomsky's ideas about language being an innate human quality, but that's about it. Besides that's not related to the Chomsky hierarchy of language, e.g. regular, context-free and so on. Those will continue to remain a hierarchy describing languages based on capability levels, whether there's AI, and AGI, or not.

The Chomsky hierarchy will remain unchanged and very useful for constructed languages. I didn't mean break out, as in create a higher level. LLMs are not going to magically become more than a turing machine or anything. I meant we need to stop thinking about spoken language in terms of the hierarchy and try to find another approach.

You can't tell me with a straight face that actual spoken language fits well in that hierarchy. It seems we can shoehorn it in with a 100B parameter turing machine definition, but that just makes my point that the constructed language hierarchy is not well suited for describing spoken languages if it takes such a large definition.

We should be able to find something like a new probabilistic theory of language that will do a much better job of describing spoken languages. Such a theory could help explain some LLM behaviors we see, and apply generally to other forms of noisy communication.

> 100B parameter ... not well suited for describing spoken languages if it takes such a large definition.

Humans by contrast use about 700T synapses to support our own understanding of language.

> To me it shows how fundamental language is to intelligence.

I believe most human intelligence is based on language. We are smart because language gives us the keys to solving all sorts of situations, based on the experience of prior generations. We are wondering if GPT architecture can generate real understanding, but forgetting the training corpus. The language corpus is the real magic here. The source and accumulation point of intelligence.

Take a baby and give it access to language, you get a modern human. Take a random init neural net, use language corpus for training, you get GPT4. It doesn't matter what the model is - brain or transformer, it doesn't matter if it's a transformer or just a RNN (RWKV). What matters is the training signal.

We should not be wondering how come computers got so smart now, we should be wondering how smart is Language. Language is a separate evolutionary system of ideas and concepts. It is a self replicator, like DNA.

You're just describing information theory. Every message is contextualized within the codebooks used to encode/decode it. Sometimes we call that codebook "language", sometimes it uses another representation.

Yes, we should develop a new theory of language based on an information theory approach rather than a discrete symbol approach, or maybe something involving both.

But you can’t say information theory as it stands gives us a completely satisfactory model of human language. Something will need to be built on top of it.

>There is no soul, creativity or inspiration. There's only (very complex) agency.

That's highly debatable. For starters, who said there's no creativity or inspiration in humans, or for that matter, that there can't be in a complex A.I.?

How we achieve that creativity or inspiration is irreleant, as long the entity (human or AI) showcases creativity and inspiration.

Nor is it much clear why all being "only (a very complex) agency" would preclude creativity and inspiration.

That's like a worse version of "a human can't be creative or have feelings because it's all a bunch of molecules".

There is such a thing as emergent properties.

>And that's completely fine.

That's also highly debatable. I mean, that it would be "completely fine" if you were right and there wasn't "creativity of inspiration".

That’s a weak explanation, because there doesn’t need to be a mind for any of that to be true.

There are deep philosophical implications, just not these.

There has been a long history of reifying the behaviors of living things in general (e.g. vitalism) and humans in particular (e.g. dualism).

The success of LLMs challenges a lot of philosophy dealing with what behaviors are and are not possible in the absence of these categorical districtions.

I have had casual debates years ago, in which strong dualists asserted that the kind of creativity exhibited by today's LLMs is simply impossible. No doubt those folks are busy inventing "special philosophical creativity" that LLMs "aren't really doing," but they've lost credibility.

LLMs have demonstrated that there was never any need to invoke categorical districtions between human behavior and math-as-implemented-by-physics. The gap is closed, there is no more room for gods.

We are the gods now. https://youtu.be/ygRNEy8mPjk

Or maybe we will create a god.