Truly understanding programming

And something nature has figured out, but we haven't, is that in order to be intelligent, we need special-purpose hardware. For example, most people have special-purpose face recognition hardware. That is also hard-wired to name-association.

There's a whole bunch of other hardwired special-purpose systems. All of which are in their own small way doing their best to make sure that the General Purpose Brain is kept firmly in step with the "reality" outside. The thing about these LLMs is they are mathematical models that don't care about that reality. So intelligence is impossible as they retreat inside their model and disappear deeper and deeper into their alternative reality.

Who was it wrote that story about traumatised soldiers who kept on disappearing and reappearing? And when the Generals discovered they were (apparently) disappearing into the past and things like that they thought it would be brilliant - as a weapon of war - to go back in history and rewrite it. Until they discovered that the Roman Army wore wristwatches ...

AI will very soon (if it isn't already) be living in that world, not ours, until we find some way of telling the AI watches didn't exist back then...

Cheers,
Wol