Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be

"Fundamentally, they are based on gathering an extraordinary amount of linguistic data (much of it codified on the internet), finding correlations between words (more accurately, sub-words called "tokens"), and then predicting what output should follow given a particular prompt as input. For all the alleged complexity of generative AI, at their core they really are models of language."

"The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language - and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. Humans use language to communicate the results of our capacity to reason, form abstractions, and make generalizations, or what we might call our intelligence. We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought."

Predictions propose superintelligence may arrive within years and could enable creation and discovery beyond current imagination, double human lifespans, or even overcome death. Existing powerful systems are primarily large language models trained on massive linguistic datasets, learning token correlations to predict outputs for given prompts. Those systems model language rather than underlying cognitive processes. Current neuroscience indicates human thinking is largely independent of language; humans use language to report and communicate reasoning, abstraction, and generalization but language is not equivalent to thought. Therefore progressively better language modeling alone offers limited reason to expect the emergence of human-level or superintelligent minds.

Read at The Verge