Based on how transformers are trained to predict the next token, you can view them as powerful compression algorithms [1]. They truly must - and do - understand complex concepts to generate text as they do.
Understanding isn't the full picture for intelligence. Marcus Hutter has argued that AGI requires both compression/comprehension, and being goal directed/having agency. I'd say chatGPT has advanced understanding, but zero agency.
However, if you ductaped a simple goal directed reinforcement learning embodied agent onto a large language model, I think you'd approach something resembling animal-like intelligence. It would have motives, and the means to try to achieve them and adapt to it's environment. There's research in using LLMs for "internal dialog" in robots which is super interesting (https://innermonologue.github.io/)
We do understand that.
The fact that a language model can produce convincing output hints that it is not that different from us.
Imagine something in 5 or 10 years time with 1000 times the power. What will it be like?
I know you think our awareness makes us fundamentally different. But what if it doesn't? What if we're just a machine that likes to anthropomorphize things reflected back on itself?
Ultimately, we won't have to know the answer.
In 10 years AIs like this will be in computer games. Some people will find the results of that disturbing. Is highly accurately similated suffering different to real suffering? The philosophical answer won't matter, the practical answer will be that AI use in games will become regulated. And then you have the first glimmer of AIs getting rights.
Why do you believe it will take 10 years?
Let alone the fact that’s it’s running in a simulated virtual machine, and the other examples presented in this article, which add layers and layers of complexity on top of that.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/understanding/#:~:text=Un...
The first link then goes on: "One central element of this view is that we are always projecting possibilities onto the world around us. ... To take an example that Samantha Matherne (2019) uses to illustrate Heidegger’s view: when I first apprehend the martini in front of me, I take it as offering a variety of possibilities—to be sipped, to be thrown, to be shaken, to be stirred. If I then take the martini as to be sipped, I am seizing on one of these possibilities and interpreting the martini in light of this specific possibility." GPT on encountering a martini will similarly consider many possibilities like this; you can run it multiple times or configure it or merely ask it to show these different possibilities it thinks can come from a situation. It seems like this definition has a lot more in common with things GPT does rather than being exclusively related to having a body.
By asking such a question you are still considering understanding as an epistemic term and not an ontological category. The example given by Ms. Matherne suffers from the same ontic reduction. I will not even try to give an example of "understanding as ontological category", taking the James Cameron way: the (language) technology is not ready yet, maybe never will; perhaps to give such an example we would require a memory transfer technology [1].
"insisting that by definition only humans can do it"
Yes, this is the entire Heideggerian project: humans as Dasein. Beyond tongue-in-cheek, Heidegger is concerned with the history of Beyng (notice capital B and unusual y, in German he spells it as "Seyn", as opposed to "Sein", the Germans capitalize all nouns by default) in which there is a "first beginning", during the Ancient Greek resolvement of metaphysics (even the word, μετά, beyond, φυσικά, physics, that which grows, is used initially only to group some texts by Aristotle written after Physics), and his search for "the other beginning". This is all very obscure. And Heidegger doesn't help it by literally inventing a language without providing a Rosetta stone. In The Event [2] he has quotes like "'Technology' as the basic truth of history qua happenstance" under the title "163. The Saying", make of it what you will. However, just above "162. The demise of metaphysics", he says "[i]f thinking has passed over into erudition [...] [e]ven those who are thoughtless will then recognize how inessential it is". So he can write clearly also. But again, to quote Edward Feigenbaum, "What does he offer us? Phenomenology! That ball of fluff. That cotton candy!" [3].
Again, this all was to give an example of a thinking with no overlap with GPT. As I see it now, departed from Heidegger's view, the problem is how we continue Galileo's project, "measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be", with or without ontological categories.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0012...
[2] Perhaps his most beautiful book, to be read from the end to the beginning, https://iupress.org/9780253006868/the-event
[3] Feigenbaum was criticizing Hubert Dreyfus, but the reprimand applies to Heidegger as well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Dreyfus%27s_views_on_ar...