Many, myself included, are captivated by the amazing capabilities of
chatGPT and other LLMs. They are, truly, incredible. Depending on your
definition of Turing Test, it passes with flying colors in many, many
contexts. It would take a much stricter Turing Test than we might have
imagined this time last year, before we could confidently say that we're
not talking to a human. One way to improve chatGPT's performance on an
actual Turing Test would be to slow it down, because it is too fast to be
human.

All that said, is chatGPT actually intelligent?  There's no question that
it behaves in a way that we would all agree is intelligent. The answers it
gives, and the speed it gives them in, reflect an intelligence that often
far exceeds most if not all humans.

I know some here say intelligence is as intelligence does. Full stop,
conversation over. ChatGPT is intelligent, because it acts intelligently.

But this is an oversimplified view!  The reason it's over-simple is that it
ignores what the source of the intelligence is. The source of the
intelligence is in the texts it's trained on. If ChatGPT was trained on
gibberish, that's what you'd get out of it. It is amazingly similar to the
Chinese Room thought experiment proposed by John Searle. It is manipulating
symbols without having any understanding of what those symbols are. As a
result, it does not and can not know if what it's saying is correct or not.
This is a well known caveat of using LLMs.

ChatGPT, therefore, is more like a search engine that can extract the
intelligence that is already structured within the data it's trained on.
Think of it as a semantic google. It's a huge achievement in the sense that
training on the data in the way it does, it encodes the *context* that
words appear in with sufficiently high resolution that it's usually
indistinguishable from humans who actually understand context in a way
that's *grounded in experience*. LLMs don't experience anything. They are
feed-forward machines. The algorithms that implement chatGPT are useless
without enormous amounts of text that expresses actual intelligence.

Cal Newport does a good job of explaining this here
<https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/what-kind-of-mind-does-chatgpt-have>
.

Terren

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