Futurology

Sure. What I'm referring to is that they just don't generate any random garbage. But actually store knowledge and have the ability to combine and apply that. Sure they get trained on some datasets. That's what AI and machine learning is all about. But it has complex implications and consequences. LLMs work very unlike "intelligent" living creatures. However that doesn't mean they can't generate "intelligent" text. They do it a different way. There are some severe limitations as of now and I didn't find good use for my real-world tasks yet as they're just not intelligent enough to do anything useful. Except translation and role-play games. That works very well and I'm glad I have something outperforming google translate by quite some degree. Intelligence isn't well defined. And it's not set in stone that you need human-like intelligence for lots of tasks... And I mean even a human can only do things they've learned before. Or infer things from other things they've learned. So fundamentally it's not that different. For example I'm not a lawyer. If I wanted to write some legal document, I'd need to read a lot of stuff and study that matter. An LLM would need to do exactly the same to be enabled to generate text that sounds like a legal document. And the "intelligence" part we're talking about is finally understanding the subject and be able to connect things, so to speak. Infer, and apply learned knowledge to new things. And we have some evidence that AI can do exactly that. So... It's a bit crude, and not there yet. But it's more than a stochastic parrot. The fundamental parts to a subarea of intelligence is there. And not by accident. Machine learning was invented to infer patterns from some datasets.

And I'm not sure about the sentience part either. Sure it's completely impossible with the current approach. But is there a fundamental barrier? Didn't nature already "code" it into existence with the structure of our brains? And we found out it's just physics? A bit of chemistry and electricity in a complex structure of interconnected cells? It's utter sci-fi, but why wouldn't we be able to the same with silicone chips? I know people regularly deny the possibility. But I've never seen a good argument or a scientific paper ruling it out. I think it's still debated whether there are fundamental barriers. Or what makes sentience in the first place. Just stating some uninformed opinion on that doesn't proove anything. And for a positive proof we're missing a good idea, research and even any hardware that'd be remotely capable of doing the calculations, lots of money and energy. So we're far away from even thinking about it. So maybe we'll know in 100 years. Or you give me some mathematical proof that rules it out?!