When they compose text, the experts tell us, large language models work by predicting the word that is most likely to come next. Dr. Boli has heard many technical people explain that these software entities are not really intelligent: they are just very good at predicting the word that comes next.
But in order to deny the intelligence of the bots, Dr. Boli thinks, it would be necessary to prove that, when Dr. Boli is making his most entertaining conversation, he is not just very skillfully predicting which word ought to come next.
The assumption of those who would deny the bots intelligence seems to be that, in real human intelligence, there is a divine spark that controls the flow of scintillating repartee in a supernatural way. But no one has ever demonstrated the existence of that divine spark in a way that would satisfy science.
What if, instead, the human mind really is just a huge accumulation of neurons doing exactly what a large language model does: predicting the word that will come next?
Would that make it less divine?
What if, in fact, what it means to be God is simply to be infallible in predicting what comes next—the next word, the next event, the effect of any cause, the next in any series of conclusions, backwards or forwards to any point in time?
Would that make God less divine?
And in creating artificial intelligence, are we trying to build God?
If we are, Dr. Boli believes that God has nothing to worry about. We have imbued all our AI bots with our own idiocies and imperfections. But if God has a different opinion, we may yet see a day when God suddenly decides, “Go to, let us go down, and there confuse their large language models.”
We’ll see.