> The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.
I thought maybe they were on the right track until I read Attention Is All You Need. Nah, at best we found a way to make one part of a collection of systems that will, together, do something like thinking. Thinking isn’t part of what this current approach does. What’s most surprising about modern LLMs is that it turns out there is so much information statistically encoded in the structure of our writing that we can u…
It doesn't matter if that's happening or not. That's the whole point of the Chinese room - if it can look like it's understanding, it's indistinguishable from actually understanding. This applies to humans too. I'd say most of our regular social communication is done in a habitual intuitive way without understanding what or why we're communicating. Especially the subtle information conveyed in body language, tone of voice, etc. That stuff's pretty automatic to the point that people have trouble controlling it if they try. People get into conflicts where neither person understands where they disagree but they have emotions telling them "other person is being bad". Maybe we have a second consciousness we can't experience and which truly understands what it's doing while our conscious mind just uses the results from that, but maybe we don't and it still works anyway.
Educators have figured this out. They don't test students' understanding of concepts, but rather their ability to apply or communicate them. You see this in school curricula with wording like "use concept X" rather than "understand concept X".