This retort doesn't make any sense. Take humanity back perhaps 40k years ago and language did not even yet exist. Our token base was 0. Put an LLM in that scenario and it will endlessly cycle on nothing and produce nothing, stuck in a snapshot in time. Put humans in that situation, and soon enough you get us.

This is like saying that somebody speaking Chinese is just playing the Chinese Room [1] experiment. The only reason it's less immediately obviously absurd here is because the black box nature of LLMs obfuscates their relatively basic algorithmic functionality and let's people anthropomorphize it into being a brain.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

> Take humanity back perhaps 40k years ago and language did not even yet exist.

This is not quite accurate. The human lips, throat etc have evolved to be better at producing speech, which indicates that it's not that recent. And that it was a factor in the success of groups who could do it better than others.

It likely started "no later than 150,000 to 200,000 years ago."

sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech#Evolution_of_...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525259/

If that is the argument though, current AI aren't just autocomplete - because we could reasonably show an AI an image or a video and have them call a tool rather than return text. That'd be comparable to a pre-language human.

I'm not seeing the comparison because what you're describing is not at all an internal or emergent process. Without a human there to hand-feed the AI access to create these tools, create the interface, and then hand feed all of it the LLM, none of this happens. This is like Kubrick's monolith, bumped up a few orders of magnitude.

> I'm not seeing the comparison because what you're describing is not at all an internal or emergent process.

And (1) that process isn't an autocomplete because it isn't reliably text->text. It could be visual->sound, sound-> action, visual->action or visual->visual or any combination. As well as proactively seeking out new stimulus. Modern LLMs aren't limited to text, they just happen to leverage a large model of the language as their most novel element.

(2) We're not talking about internal or emergent processes, we're talking about intelligence. No human is born intelligent. They go through a pretty similar process to LLMs where a lot of data gets dumped on them and they start responding to it.

Humans obviously need air to breathe. If you give us scuba lessons and extensive gear we can go underwater and keep breathing air, but the fundamental operation doesn't change. It's the same with LLMs. When you send an image to an LLM it's not parsed by the LLM but handed off to a separate program that converts it into a text format for the LLM which then is then sent back to the same old autocomplete process.

And yes humans are born intelligent. Have children and it's the most amazing and beautiful thing watching them begin to create out of nothing. For instance with absolutely zero prompting or external guidance children will begin to engage in intentful make believe play, like starting to share their food with their favorite toy.

But this 'something from nothing' is also essentially required if you think about it. Try to put yourself back in primitive man's shoes some tens of thousands of years ago. You know basically nothing about the world around you, yet in the blink of an eye we've discovered the secrets of the atom, put a man on the Moon, created mathematics from nothing, created all the underlying technology and infrastructure required for us to have our little debate here online, and so much more.

And what would that make yours?

I think, therefore I am. You parrot, therefore you are... ?

So you're saying humans essentially do the same thing. We agree!

I’m saying you certainly do. Most people I know have an internal experience and a far richer mental model than a glorified markov chain.

If you want to declare yourself an NPC language model then go ahead but let the rest of us that experience meaning carry on.