We could claim the human brain is just 100 million neurons arranged in a mesh were each neuron has their own 'activation potential'.
Neither your or my statement are wrong. But again until we can pinpoint what (human) intelligence is, then claiming squid or neural networks are unable to be intelligent agents is just as emotional as the people you criticize.
It doesnt matter what algorithm in this family we choose, they all just produce correlative models of the data given. So if we give a NN a library of books, it produces a function whose structure is just correlations of words in those books.
To believe that the structure of this function has anything to do with language, the brain, or anything else is pseudoscience. It isnt close to science, it isnt an open or a philosophical question, it's homoeopathy.
Language use in humans is not a function of correlations of word frequencies. We know this, as much as we know where mars is.
No human is shown a trillion books and arrives at an internal model of language corresponding to word frequencies in those books. We know that it would be impossible to do this, since words refer to the world -- and correlations between word frequencies dont.
Your comment here defending this is equivalent to a homoepath saying "we dont know everything about chemistry". We dont know everything, but we do know that diluting with water doesnt make substances more efficaious.
And we do know that the correlational structure of text in books captured with any algorithm whatsoever, has nothing to do with modelling language. We know any such system cannot use language, as at least, it has no model of how words refer to the environment.
However:
> Language use in humans is not a function of correlations of word frequencies.
I would argue that this is untrue. For example, people pick up on common expressions (and other behaviors) of those around them. If I hang out with people that say "catch my drift" a lot, I will probably also start using "catch my drift" more. I find it very plausible that "my internal model of language" is in many (but not all) aspects driven by the word correlations I observe around me.
I do wonder about the absoluteness of your statements though. Would a bed-ridden person that has no sense of touch/sight/smell etc. except hearing (i.e. only able to interact with the world via language) be "not human" to you? If not, how is "the environment" different for it and GPT-3 (other than context window)?
When I say "not a function of" i mean, explicitly, that the model does not have a term which depends on these correlations. Just as F=GMm/r^2 does not have a term for "image pixel weights".
Real Language is what wrote all those books, as much as gravity is what made the night sky. Pixels and word frequencies are symptoms, a few of an infinity of symptoms -- distant effects, whose correlations are not models of their causes.
You actually can't because, unlike neural networks (we know exactly what they do), we don't have anything even close to an exhaustive view of the functioning of the human brain.