What if transformer models are the totally wrong approach? Frankly, I say "so what?" For this to be "wrong" implies that the only useful outcome is AGI. I posi

What if transformer models are the totally wrong approach? Frankly, I say "so what?" For this to be "wrong" implies that the only useful outcome is AGI. I posit that that is clearly not the case. Current approaches are obviously useful and create value. It's like trying to invent television and getting radio instead. OK, fine, you still got something useful, so what are you complaining about? And the other will still come in time. What if we're about to spend ten years iterating on a fancy parlor trick? If it keeps getting better at doing things that people find useful, then that's fine. We might invent something that almost seems like AGI but really it's just calling a bunch of APIs invented (and maintained) by humans. Not really relevant, IMO. If the thing we invent behaves in ways that can be classified as showing intelligent behavior, then it's intelligent. If it reaches the bar that most people are willing to say "that's general intelligence", then it doesn't actually matter how it works. OK, to be fair there are senses in which it matters (getting into things like explainability, alignment, etc. yadda, yadda) but in terms of saying "is this intelligent or not?" we don't really have to know or care about the inner workings. I mean, we consider other humans intelligent (well, sometimes) and we don't know all the details of how human intelligence works either.