> Inability to introspect your own word selections does not mean it’s meaningfully different from what an LLM does. There is plenty of evidence that humans do a lot of things that are not driven by conscious choice and we rationalize it after the fact.
This is correct and also completely irrelevant. I am describing what I experience, and describing how my experience seems very different to next token prediction. I therefore conclude that it's plausible that there is more involved than something which can be reduced to next token prediction.
> And how is that different? You are not so subtly implying that an LLM can’t consider an idea but you haven’t established this as fact. i.e. You are starting with the assumption that an LLM cannot possibly think and therefore cannot be intelligent, but this is just begging the question.
Language models can't think outside of producing tokens. There is nothing going on within an LLM when it's not producing tokens. The only thing it does is taking in tokens as input and producing a token probability distribution as output. It seems plausible that this is not enough for general intelligence.
> You cannot spin experience as intelligence.
Correct, but I can point out that the only generally intelligent beings we know of have these sorts of experiences. Given that we know next to nothing about how a human's general intelligence works, it seems plausible that experience might play a part.
> LLMs have the experience of reading the entire internet, something you cannot conceive of.
I don't know that LLMs have an experience. But correct, I cannot conceive of what it feels like to have read and remembered the entire Internet. I am also a general intelligence and an LLM is not, so there's that.
> Certainly your experiences shape who you are. This is a different axis from intelligence, though.
I don't know enough about what makes up general intelligence to make this claim. I don't think you do either.
> Both sides of this claim seem dubious. The second half in particular seems to be founded on nothing. Again, you are asserting with no support that there is no thinking going on.
I'm telling you how these technologies work. When a language model isn't performing inference, it is not doing anything. A language model is a function which takes a token stream as input and produces a token probability distribution as output. By definition, there is no thinking outside of producing words. The function isn't running.
> I don’t think anyone sane is claiming an LLM can have a human experience. But it is not clear that a human experience is necessary for intelligence.
I 100% agree. It is not clear whether a human experience is necessary for intelligence. It is plausible that something approximating a human-like experience is necessary for intelligence. It is also plausible that something approximating human-like experience is completely unnecessary and you can make an AGI without such experiences.
It's plausible that next token prediction is sufficient for AGI. It's also plausible that it isn't.