The narcissism might not be in thinking 'intelligence might not be as complicated as we thought’ - the narcissism might be in thinking ‘LLM intelligence is the way we thought’.

I understand the charge, but it's soemwhat unfair. It's more like we start to see a correspondence which even 20 years ago was barely considered

It's also not the first time a breakthrough technology was compared to the human brain/mind, but we also know biologically animal nervous systems are not digital computers, telephone/telegraph networks or hydraulic systems.

I'm not saying LLMs work in the same way as us. But a few years ago humans used to be the only competent users of language on the planet. Now its humans + LLMs who are competent users of langauge. This is a big change, and I'm saying that it might be pointing to something deeper about complexity and how approaches to deal with complexity arise in the universe.

sure, but its facile to dismiss these breakthroughs as naive metaphors. physicans do understand now many bodily systems can be modeled with the same tools an engineer will model his machines. its not because these abstractions are incomplete, they are wrong.

Even if you just consider LLMs to be stochastic parrots, its still a blow to humans, as in 'a sufficiently sophisticated stochastic parrot can actually be fairly capable'. Its like Searle's Chinese Room suddenly arrives and turns out to be pretty handy at office jobs. Its a significant change.

We train them on the sum of human knowledge available in digital format, so I'm not sure that's an indictment, and the large models are incredibly complicated to the point it's hard to reverse engineer how they work so well and what they're actually doing to build internal models to predict the next token. Several billion to several trillion parameters is anything but simple.

Right, we needed compute on a large and fast scale to make LLMs actually work. But the basic principles are quite simple: train on a huge dataset for long enough, using some fairly simple ML maths but across a very large dimensional space, and then out the other side you get something that can competently use language, and is capable of doing useful work. This is somewhat surprising, no?

Yes, it is surprising.

Freud doesn't belong in that group. Freud was a fraud.

Right, I'm not really into Freudian therapy and a lot of his stuff was subjective rather than scientific. Freud is commonly put in that group because (a) he rather boldly declared himself part of it and (b) his name is a token for the idea of "we dont know ourselves as well as we think, and we are very capable of deceiving ourselves" ... this was an idea that was around a long time before freud but he formalised the vocabulary around it (subconscious etc) and so his name is now strongly associated with that idea.