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If you built a complex series of gears that took input, revolved through different sets of millions of gears, and produced meaningful output, I would consider that a form of intelligence.

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Agreed. My understanding of NN is that more than matrix multiplication, it’s that it’s a general purpose solver. You could write the same thing yourself, it would just take you ages.

So with unlimited budget and time, can you write something complex enough to seem intelligent? I think so. Is what you wrote actually intelligent? No idea, and I think that’s more philosophy than I’m interested in.

General purpose solving functions will only get better with time and already solve more than we can write solvers for by hand. I don’t suspect there’s a limit here, assuming we can keep improving in ways to scale its compute and scale the function goals.

You are basically describing an automaton, some of them were very elaborate and able to write with a pen on paper. People probably misinterpreted it for intelligence, basically thing have improved, but not changed.

Whether you build it with gears, transistors on silicon wafer, or biological neurons, it doesn't matter. If complex enough arrangement of enough neurons can give rise to intelligence, then so can enough transistors or enough gears.

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