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MW defines verbal as "of, relating to, or consisting of words". I don't think anyone would argue that animals don't communicate with each other. Some may even

MW defines verbal as "of, relating to, or consisting of words". I don't think anyone would argue that animals don't communicate with each other. Some may even have language we can't interpret, which may consist of something like words. The question is why we would model an AGI after verbal language as opposed to modeling it after the native intelligence of all life which eventually leads to communication as a result. Language and communication is a side-effect of intelligence, it's a compounding interest on intelligence, but it is not intelligence itself, any more than a map is the terrain.

matt_kantor 1y ago
> The question is why we would model an AGI after verbal language as opposed to modeling it after the native intelligence of all life which eventually leads to communication as a result. Because verbal/written language is an abstracted/compressed representation of reality, so it's relatively cheap to process (a high-level natural-language description of an apple takes far fewer bytes to represent than a photo or 3D model of the same apple). Also because there are massive digitized publicly-available collections of language that are easy to train on (the web, libraries of digitized books, etc). I'm just answering your question here, not implying that language processing is the path towards AGI (I personally think it could play a part, but can't be anything close to the whole picture).