I suspect this ends up being pretty important for the next advancements in AI, specifically LLM-based AI. To me, the transformer architecture is a sort of compression algorithm that is being exploited for emergent behavior at the margins. But I think this is more like stream of consciousness than premeditated thought. Eventually I think we figure out a way to "think" in latent space and have our existing AI models be just the mouthpiece.

In my experience as a human, the more you know about a subject, or even the more you have simply seen content about it, the easier it is to ramble on about it convincingly. It's like a mirroring skill, and it does not actually mean you understand what you're saying.

LLMs seem to do the same thing, I think. At scale this is widely useful, though, I am not discounting it. Just think it's an order of magnitude below what's possible and all this talk of existing stream-of-consciousness-like LLMs creating AGI seems like a miss