Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like you, I thought these pieces of software and data were little more than statistics-based text generators. But it turns out that this is a Category Mistake. There was an argument made by Raphaël Millière in a recent Mindscape Podcast [1] with Sean Carroll that finally landed for me. He used the example that human beings are driven to eat and reproduce, so by that argument all humans are just eating and reproducing…
That emergence is precisely what I'm looking for evidence of. Human beings evolved to eat and reproduce and yet here we are, building computers and inventing complex mathematical models of language and debating whether they're intelligent. We're so far from the environment we evolved to solve that we've clearly demonstrated the ability to adapt. ChatGPT doing well at a language task isn't demonstrating that same abil…
https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2210.13382
PS: More research has been done since that confirmed and strengthened the conclusion.