No, he's missed the mark here. The retreat to imprecise non-statements like "ChatGPT cannot know or understand anything, so it is not intelligence" is a flag that you're reading ideology and not analysis. I mean, it's true as far as it goes. But it's no more provable than it is for you or I, it's just a dance around the semantics of the words "understand" and "know".
In particular the quip that it's really just a "bullshit generator" is 100% correct. But also true for, y'know, all the intelligent humans on the planet.
At the end of the day AI gets stuff wrong, as far as we can tell, for basically the same reasons that we get stuff wrong. We both infer from intuition to make our statements about life, and bolt "reasoning" and "logic" on as after the fact optimizations that need to be trained as skills.
(I'm a lot more sympathetic to the free software angle, btw. The fact that all these models live and grow only within extremely-well-funded private enclosures is for sure going to have some very bad externalities as the technology matures.)
He's not comparing them to humans, he attributes knowledge/understanding (enough to pass his bar for "is AI") to yolov5 models, xgboost trained trees and as far as I can tell closed source transformer based models too. But not ChatGPT.
Just as people once hated being told that Earth isn't the center of the universe, so goes the ego when it comes down to discovering the origin of our thoughts.
In particular the quip that it's really just a "bullshit generator" is 100% correct. But also true for, y'know, all the intelligent humans on the planet.
At the end of the day AI gets stuff wrong, as far as we can tell, for basically the same reasons that we get stuff wrong. We both infer from intuition to make our statements about life, and bolt "reasoning" and "logic" on as after the fact optimizations that need to be trained as skills.
(I'm a lot more sympathetic to the free software angle, btw. The fact that all these models live and grow only within extremely-well-funded private enclosures is for sure going to have some very bad externalities as the technology matures.)