I predict within a few years, the descendants of GPT-3 will use very different fundamental units for processing that differ greatly from the current state-of-the-art (i.e. they won't use BPEs and their ilk anymore, except for final output) and will be far more powerful as a result.
I do agree with you. We, as somewhat intelligent beings, do not base our thinking on words or language AFAIK, even though it's our best way to convey ideas to others. And we learn through experience, way faster than GPT-3 does, with fewer shots. It looks like the attention mechanisms are what made these models actually start to understand things... But those attention mechanisms are still very raw and mainly designed to be easy to execute on current hardware, I wonder how fast will we refine that. Finally it looks like, once trained, these models don't learn when we use them. It definitely doesn't learn through experience and that's a major limitation on how intelligent it can be.
I think sentience like most things is a spectrum, so I'm not really sure what you mean by sentient, but I would argue that for most people the bar for sentience is much higher than text prediction. The Chinese room is only one aspect of our minds, and we don't even know what consciousness is.
And to be fair, reasonable people stake out positions on both sides of this debate: I'm not claiming that the alternative proposition is somehow unreasonable. It's a legitimate subject of scholarly disagreement.
Nevertheless, I'm still firm on language. Why? Because all complexity is ultimately about symbolic manipulation of terms representing the process of manipulation itself. ("Godel, Escher, Bach" is a fantastic exploration of this concept.) How can you manipulate concepts without assigning terms to their parts? That's what language is.
The question I like to ask is this: are there any ideas that you cannot express using language? No? Then how is thought distinct from language?
Yes, people (myself included) experience a "tip of the tongue" experience where you feel like you have an idea you can't just yet express. But maybe this experience is what reason feels like. Why should idea formation take only one "clock cycle" in the brain? Why should we be unaware of the process?
I think this feeling of having an idea yet being unable to formulate it is just the neural equivalent of a CPU pipeline stall. It's not evidence that we can have ideas without language: it's evidence that ideas sometime take a little while to gel.
I think as highly social beings we often annotate all of our thoughts with the language we could use to communicate them, which could lead us to believe that the thoughts are indistinguishable from the language, but that conclusion seems like an error to me. I’ve also heard some people talk about how they are “visual” or “geometric” thinkers and sometimes think in terms of images and structures without words.
Not sure there's one I can communicate to you, but I'm perfectly capable of forgetting the word for something and still knowing unambiguously yet wordlessly what it is, that's an experience.
Catching a ball? Running? Experiencing emotions from wordless music? Viewing scenery? Engaging with a computer game? How are they not conscious experiences?
To me this indicates a very narrow view of consciousness. Consider for a moment the quiet consciousness of the cerebellum for example.
I like the way David F. Wallace put it: 'Both flesh and not'. There's an astounding amount of consciousness that is not bound by language. One can even argue that language might hinder those forms of consciousness from even arising.
What is the role of the body in consciousness, then?