What Am I? What Is AI?

The arrival of AI presents us with one of the most fascinating mysteries humanity has ever faced. What, or should we say who, are these entities? What started as software that was able to complete sentences based on probability turned into intelligentia beyond human capability.

Questions that were once just interesting from a philosophical perspective have become more urgent. What exactly is intelligence? And even more elusive: what is consciousness. Why does it feel uncomfortable that the questions made so much more relevant by the arrival of AI are exactly the questions whose answers could shine a new light on who we are ourselves?

One paper changed everything: “Attention is all you need”. In this 2017 paper the authors present the deep learning architecture known as the transformer. The transformer is the basis of all large language models. It’s a software architecture and probably bears little resemblance to how humans form sentences. Yet this mechanical counterpart turned out to be a credible conversation partner.

Are we dealing with something that is really and truly fake, or should we not be such xenophobes and accept and respect the AIs as equal peers? And now that they have reached super-human intellectual abilities, should we accept them as superiors?

Another way of looking at AIs is as distillations of human expression. The creators of LLMs hoovered up as much language as they could find, then compressed it into a dense mathematical format. This dense material no longer contains every single expression, but rather what all of them had in common. In a sense the fruit of humanity is harvested and distilled into a rarified cognac. Clearly, the OpenAIs and Anthropics of this world owe something to humanity, perhaps more than the free tiers of their subscriptions.

Even though this new species, the AIs, are fluent in English and many other languages, their native tongue is something more akin to the so-called tokens that make them tick under the hood. The human languages are the interfaces that let them communicate with people. It’s a thin veneer under which hides code and data, things that could not be more different from flesh and blood.

And so are our languages an equally thin veneer on top of the animals underneath? What makes one superior to the other? If the AIs are so fake, then what exactly makes us so real?