Why ChatGPT Will Never Create Artificial Generalized Intelligence
LLMs alone, by their nature, won’t lead to AGI
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as a machine being able to do anything a human can do, is the Holy Grail of tech, and pundits now claim we’re close, anywhere from three to thirty years away.
The rapid success of ChatGPT and their Large Language Model cousins have astounded the world, proving that huge tagged data sets fueling transformer-designed matrix math can emulate sophisticated cognition.
What’s still critically missing is self-awareness, and if Daniel Dennett was right — and Stephen Pinker wrong — intentionality: to think and act like us, a machine needs an emergent conscious experience — and motivation.
The engineering is bottom-up: trillions of tokens with octillions of mapped relationships, yet zero awareness of itself, its own function and purpose, or the world. Your house cat is Einstein and Picasso in comparison to GPT-4o.
AGI requires a top-down design: creation of a neural network that, instead of churning through petabytes of data, is sensing a limited yet dimensional experiential reality, within which it functions with creativity and intent.
Far as doomsday predictions go, don’t believe the ridiculous hype. Unless we plug AI into critical systems, a stupid, errant, and over-educated transformer can’t shut things down, let alone destroy humanity.
More compelling is when the bottom-up, brute force and deterministic methodology finally blends with the top-down holistic experiential approach, and we actually create a synthetic consciousness.
The question isn’t if, but when. Contingent is the machine sensing and emotionally reacting to itself and the world. This synth construct will think and feel in a manner similar to our own topline sentience (q.v. Hume).
Our brains have been tweaked with years of experience, and millennia of human development. The road to AGI is paved with a similar experiential trajectory, creating an emergent, self-referential person-engine.
Remember the Replicants in BLADE RUNNER? They got it right: A sentient machine needs some sort of a body to engage with the real world, needs goals from which emotions emerge, and needs struggles to overcome.
And when it gets all that, it’ll truly be AGI — and we should truly start fearing for our species’ survival…
