Citation:

"These days, her favorite question to ask people is “What is the deepest insight you have gained from ChatGPT?”

“My own answer,” she said, “is that I think it radically demystifies thinking”

I think it radically demystifies _language generation_ and it seems this is part of the brain’s function too.

So we know how to create a part of the brain using simple techniques, which suggests that intelligence might not be so magical as we think. But thinking, well we still don’t know what that is yet.

It feels like, hey, there is a route to machine intelligence.

The big question is how long is that route. Do we have the ingredients to build a brain with the right architecture? And I’d say “nope”. But I’m not so confident that with half a dozen breakthroughs we’d get there. How many years per breakthrough? Well, it’s been nearly a decade since the last one. So 60 years on that count. But more money is going in and there may be some compounding effect, but it should at least be unlikely someone suddenly produces AGI next year. More likely we stairstep and with each step the estimated window should tighten.

But I really don’t think we know what thinking is.

That is probably my big takeaway from LLMs as well.