Anyone who engages in serious dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM) may get the impression they are interacting with an intelligence. But many experts in the field argue the impression is just that. In philosopher Daniel Dennett’s words, such systems display “competence without comprehension”.
The hype about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) from big corporations and their celebrity spokespersons has prompted a backlash, in which scepticism turns to cynicism, often tinged with paranoia about how “stochastic parrots” may start to control our lives.
