This is a really clear explanation of what’s happening in when someone says “it’s not thinking it’s just pattern-matching” and someone else says “well isn’t that all humans really do too?”
Rather: ChatGPT can engage in some level of System 1 thinking, by pattern-matching and even cleverly recombining the entire corpus of System 1 thinking displayed all over the internet. Humans do engage in this type of thinking and it’s a significant accomplishment for an AI. But humans also engage in System 2 thinking. My bet is AGI requires System 2. It’s not clear if that is a gap of degree or kind for this type of AI.
We clearly have multiple modes of thinking, and we know when to apply each, reasonably well. It’s really interesting to see ChatGPT in its current state of language rambling, that’s impressive and coherent as can be. When it does symbolic or logical work, it often does well for a bit and then completely goes off track, seemingly unaware that it’s “lost touch” with reality, similar to someone with a stroke or concussion. But future iterations may not be so simple to reason about, unless we can turn on and off certain features and OpenAI continues to be less than open. I suspect coming iterations will integrate math, searches, crawling etc and that can truly be powerful in combination, just like our own brains, but again on steroids. I’ve always been quite skeptical of grand proclamations about AI btw.
How people often speak of seeing words in dreams but being unable to make out their meaning reinforces this idea. I experienced this last night. I could see shapes of words but when I looked closely the shapes had no meaning, they looked like how Dall-E and other images generators hallucinate word shapes.
Rather: ChatGPT can engage in some level of System 1 thinking, by pattern-matching and even cleverly recombining the entire corpus of System 1 thinking displayed all over the internet. Humans do engage in this type of thinking and it’s a significant accomplishment for an AI. But humans also engage in System 2 thinking. My bet is AGI requires System 2. It’s not clear if that is a gap of degree or kind for this type of AI.