“GPT is not really intelligent/doesn’t really understand things/doesn’t have a model of the world, because it just analyzes large volumes of text to find patterns from which it can generate predictions”. okay and you do something different than that? I mean, we have an additional stream of training data, in the form of our senses, but otherwise, what do you do that makes you intelligent or proves you have a “model of the world” that GPT doesn’t have?
Collect data, make inferences, correct for errors, generalize your corrected inferences to make predictions: is that not how we learn things, too? You start out in life illiterate and nonverbal, and through exposure to large volumes of text (spoken, and eventually, also written), you are trained to understand and generate language.
What is the difference? GPT doesn’t directly experience the world, but only learns about it secondhand through text? We don’t directly experience the world either. Noumenal data gets filtered through your sense organs. I do think it would be reasonable to say that that’s a much lower-level encoding than text, in terms of the degree of abstraction. It gives us a better model of the physical properties of the world, or at least a more detailed model. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we “understand” the world in some sense that GPT does not.
This post is about this article, in which GPT-4 spontaneously decided to intentionally deceive a human being to achieve a specific outcome. Some people are still trying to shift the goalposts of what counts as being “really intelligent” or what “really understands” the world - that seems silly and completely beside the point to me. We’re already long past the bar that the original Turing test set; we now have on record a robot successfully lying to a human to get them to… solve a captcha for it. What does “CAPTCHA” stand for again? Oh yes, “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.
If you were in 2001: A Space Oddyssey, would you be arguing with HAL 9000 about whether or not he has qualia, or if he’s like the Chinese Room? I would rather focus on getting the pod bay doors open.







