Conversely, these models open up philosophical questions of "exactly what a human is" beyond language abilities. How much of what we think, do, and perceive comes from the use of language?
Language models feed from the same source. They carry as much claim to intelligence, it's the same intelligence. What makes language models inferior today is the lack of access to feedback signals. They are not embodied, embedded and enacted in the environment (the 4 E's). They don't even have a code execution engine to iterate on bugs. But they could have.
And when a models does have access to massive experimentation, search and can learn from its outcomes, like AlphaGo, then it can beat us at our own game. Trained just in self-play mode, learning from verifying outcomes, was enough to surpass two thousand years of history, all of our players put together.
I think future code generation models will surpass human level based on massive problem solving experience, and most of it will be generated by its previous version. A human could not experience as much in a lifetime.
This is the second source of intelligence - experience. For language models it only costs money to generate, it's not a matter of getting more human data. So the path is wide open now. Who has the money to crank out millions of questions, problems and tasks + their solutions?
This is such a profound idea. I’ve been wondering about that for a while. Is there anywhere to read up on it?
One of the really troublesome problems with Sapir-Whorf and derivatives is that they led directly to some very nasty totalitarian behaviors. In "1984" a core policy of the Big Brother government is Newspeak, in which language changes are (believed to be) used to control the thoughts of the population and establish eternal power for the Party. This wasn't merely a quirky bit of fictional sci-fi, it was directly inspired by the actual beliefs of the hard left. The extent to which Newspeak was an accurate portrayal of life under the Nazis and Communists is explored in "Totalitarian language : Orwell's Newspeak and its Nazi and communist antecedents".
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/2016479
Today it's known that Sapir-Whorf isn't supported by the evidence, but there's still a strong desire on the political left to manipulate thought through language. Stanford's recent "Elimination of Harmful Language" initiative is a contemporary example of this intuition in practice. It doesn't work but it sounds so much easier than engaging in debate that people can't let it go.
tl;dr to the extent this has been studied already, intelligence is not in the language.