Whereas (obviously) ChatGPT is completely based on language and can’t do anything without language or anything that isn’t derived directly from language.
It was a terrifying experience, but it was also a valuable one as it changed the way I view intelligence.
10 days in my writing and speech skills had devolved to that of a primary school aged child. I tried to type a text message and struggled to come up with simple words like “and”. My speech slowed down considerably.
The terrifying thing was that my internal world was still as complex and meaningful as it was before. All of the emotions I felt were real and legitimate. My cognition outside of lqnguage was intact, I could do math just fine and conceptualize and abstract problems.
In spite of this, I was unable to convey what I was feeling and thinking to the outside world. It felt like I was trapped inside my own body.
After recovering, my intuitive understanding of the link between language and intelligence was changed forever.
See the following for more info on Topamax/Topiramate language impairment: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10072-008-0906-5
But my inner world is still extremely rich. I have very complex thoughts, can solve complex puzzles, etc., all without thinking any words.
It sounds like your medication gave you a particularly intense experience of this.
Many people have historically downplayed the consciousness of animals and babies on account of their inability to understand language, but it seems language likely has nothing to do with consciousness.
The thing to keep in mind - we know very little about how the human mind works.
Thinking that somehow humans are special and then making conclusions about LLMs truly work based on that it just pointless IMO.
Who knows. Maybe consciousness itself is a next word predictor.
All we know now is that LLMs exhibit some emergent behaviors that allows them to do very useful kinds of reasoning that was previously only possible by humans. Engaging in heated debate derails the eventual goal of putting these capabilities into use.
This is like “computers are just calculators”.
My team has been neck-deep in applications this past year. We have nobody on the team with ML experience and largely do not know how any of this works under the hood. But what we have built over the past months is considerable familiarity with the “personalities” of LLMs. Like this emotional context improving performance is a basic learning at this point.