Of course, just like any other technology. What else could be the case? I don't see this as a point of concern. Is it overhyped - yes (salespeople gonna sell); is it still useful in a number of applications - also yes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFuckingLit/comments/jed2vd/...
Now, what about neural networks? Well, you replace that guy with a one liner math function and call it a day. Now consider that you have billions of guys like that in your head, way more than any of our simplified neural networks, and it becomes very clear how far we are from getting anywhere. They are really important, they decide who to connect to, where and when to send signals etc. Neural networks doesn't model neurons, just the network hoping that the neuron wasn't important.
Everything you say is true, and more. There is another kind of cell in the brain that outnumbers neurons about ten to one. They’re called glial cells and they come in numerous forms. We used to think they were just support cells but more recently started to find ways they are involved in computation. Here is one link:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_synapse
The computational role they have is unclear so far (unless there is more recent stuff I am not aware of) but they are involved.
We are nowhere near the human brain. I think it will take at least a few more orders of magnitude plus much additional understanding.
GPT-3 only looks amazing to us because we are easily fooled by bullshit. It impresses us for the same reason millions now follow a cult called Qanon based on a series of vague shitposts. This stuff glitters to our brains like shiny objects for raccoons.
What this stuff does show is that generating coherent and syntactically correct but meaningless language is much easier than our intuition would suggest:
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/yoavg/d76121dfde2618422139
Those are extremely simple models and they already produce passable text. You could probably train it on a corpus of new age babble and create a cult with it. GPT-3 is just enormous compared to those models, so it’s not surprising to me that it bullshits very convincingly.
Edit: forgot to mention the emerging subject of quantum biology. It’s looking increasingly plausible that quantum computation of some kind (probably very different from what we are building) happens in living systems. It would not shock me if it played a role in intelligence. The speed with which the brain can generalize suggests something capable of searching huge n-dimensional spaces with crazy efficiency. Keep in mind that the brain only consumes around 40-80 watts of power while doing this.
They’re really just freaking enormous regression models that can in theory fit any function or set of them with enough parameters. Think of them as a kind of lossy compression but for the “meta” or function itself rather than the output.
The finding that some cognitive tasks like assembling language are easier than we would intuitively think is also an interesting finding in and of itself. It shows that our brains probably don’t have to actually work that hard to assemble text, which makes some sense because we developed our language. Why would we develop a language that had crazy high overhead to synthesize?
It absolutely could be used to manufacture spam and low quality filler at industrial scale. Those couple Swedish guys that write almost all pop music should be worried about their jobs.