It seems to me that the key to human intelligence is nothing like what LMs do anyway; we don’t just correlate vast quantities of text tokens. They have meanings. That is, words correlate to objects in our world model, learned through lived experience, and sentences correspond to claims about how those objects are related to one another or are changing. Without being rooted in sensory, and perhaps even motor, experience, I don’t think general intelligence can be achieved. Language by itself can only go so far.
It seems to me that the key to human intelligence is nothing like what LMs do anyway; we don’t just correlate vast quantities of text tokens. They have meanings. That is, words correlate to objects in our world model, learned through lived experience, and sentences correspond to claims about how those objects are related to one another or are changing. Without being rooted in sensory, and perhaps even motor, experience, I don’t think general intelligence can be achieved. Language by itself can only go so far.