I cannot tell if you are asserting my comment is chauvinistic with your use of "we." If that is so: that's a poor counter to my point or assessment of my stance because it assumes I'm making a baseless argument as a "proud human."

My original comment (roughly "there's no intelligence in this article, nor sentience in LLMs") is in response to the blog post's buried lede (that the cumulative activity of LLMs has accrued to a weight of "AGI is around the corner" or "there is artificial consciousness in this matrix").

To be clear, I'm not saying LLMs are useless or a wrong direction in development of "AI," but rather it's the Fool's Gold for the path towards AGI, the pursuit of the academic field of Artificial Intelligence research. A research that I've been abreast of for years before this new age of language models that has made everyone with a keyboard an arm chair expert.

Also, thank you for the book recommendation, it's on my list! :)

Wait, did I grossly misunderstand Blindsight?? I definitely thought that the aliens were 100% conscious (or at least elements of some conscious entity) and that the humans interpretation of their interactions with the Rorschach were supposed to be read as a blot test (through a rather heavy handed metaphor) demonstrating that basically the humans were the monsters and were twisting logic into letting them justify destroying the scary alien ship.

I don't think skepticism should be called chauvinism. I imagine that artificial consciousness could be made. But I don't think this is it.

Also I don't see why intelligence not being consciousness is scary? My cats are very conscious as far as I can tell, but not particularly intelligent. I think LLM's exhibit some contextual intelligence without there being any particular reason to believe they're conscious other than woo psuedoscience.