LLMs are, to put it in human brain terms, super, super, super hypertrophied speech centers. The human brain is completely capable of having grown a hypertrophie

LLMs are, to put it in human brain terms, super, super, super hypertrophied speech centers. The human brain is completely capable of having grown a hypertrophied speech center if that was the path to intelligence. It did not, because that is not the path to general intelligence. Of course LLMs can't play Pokemon long term. Used this way, they're the AI equivalent of someone who has the beginnings of dementia, who knows it, and is compensating by metaphorically sitting in a corner rocking to themselves repeating things so they don't forget them, because all they can remember is what they said. It's amazing what they can do. I'm not denying anything they have actually done, because things that have been concretely been done, are done. But the AIs that will actually fulfill the promises of this generation of AI are the ones yet to come, that incorporate some sort of memory-analog that isn't just "I repeated something to myself inside my token window", and some sort of symbolic manipulation capability. In both cases, I'm using "some sort of" very broadly. I don't know what that looks like any more than anyone else. For instance, to obtain "symbolic manipulation capability" I don't necessarily mean hooking up a symbolic manipulation package. Humans can manipulate symbols but we clearly do it in a somewhat inefficient and often incorrect way with our neural nets. Even so, we get a great deal of benefit from it. We don't have integrated symbolic manipulation packages, and using the ones that exist is actually a rather rare and difficult skill. But what LLMs do is really quite different from either what humans or software packages do. However I think it's pretty clear that LLMs aren't really going to get much farther than they have now in terms of raw capability. People will continue to find clever ways to use them, of course, but the raw capabilities of LLMs qua LLMs are probably pretty close to tapped out. I expect in the future that what we today call "LLMs" will become a component of a system that parses text into vectors and then feeds those vectors into what we consider the "real" AI as those vectors, and the AI will in turn emit vectors back into the LLM module that will be converted to human speech. And I rather suspect those LLMs, since they won't be the thing trying to do the "real work", will actually be quite a bit smaller than they are today, with the bulk of the computational power being allocated to the "real" AI. We won't be hypertrophying the LLM layer to try to provide a poor and tiny memory and maintain the state of whatever is happening because the "real" AI layer will be doing that. The future will probably laugh at us sitting here trying to make the language center bigger and bigger and bigger when obviously the correct answer was to... do whatever it is they did in their past but our future.