Are AI Chatbots intelligent?

 

"A chatbot as a mouth on the screen of a mobile phone"

Will chatbots based on the large language model lead to advancd general artificial intelligence?

Or are we heading towards another AI winter?

In his latest post, What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud? Gary Marus questions the very high levels of investment in the latest developments and he suggests that the possible return on investment has been over-hyped. He quotes an article from Fortune:

Perhaps we should go back to first principles and look at the foundations of human intelligence. and see how ChatGPT relates to them. by considering the flow of cultural information.

MicroCODIL

             

Most of the CODIL research was carried out on mainframe computers which have long been retired from service, but in the early 1980s it was decided to produce a demonstration version, in the form of an educational package that would work on a BBC Micro - which was a popular hobby minicomputer which was used widely in schools and over 1.5 million were produced. The result was MicroCODIL. A large number of BBC microcomputers have survived (typically several are advertised at any one time on eBay) the package can still be run to demonstrate MicroCODIL and how it provides a transparent human-friendly framework.

The Syntax of CODIL

In the  CODIL interpreters  information about the tasks being executed  is mapped from the CODIL text onto a table which represent a map of a recursive network where each node in the network represents a set or a partition of a set.  To keep the human interface the syntax is a simple as possible and it is not concerned about the conventional distinction between "program" and "data".

 

CODIL is best understood in similar way to a symbolic assembly language designed to work on a recursive network.  A conventional symbolic language  consists of  simple lists of commands mapped onto successive cells in an array.  However each command has a syntax structure which includes an explicit instruction and control and/or address information.