GPT can give a single Yes/No answer that indicates a fair amount of intelligence for the right question. No iteration there. Just a single pass through the network. Hofstadter is surprised by this.
There’s maybe an interesting philosophical question of perspective there because if you think of the GPT as answering the question ‘if you had just read this, what token would you expect to read next?’ That doesn’t seem like a question that necessarily requires ‘intelligence’ so much as ‘data’. It’s just a classification problem and we’ve been throwing NNs at that for years.
But if you ask the question ‘if you had just written this, what token would you expect to output next?’ It feels like the answer would require intelligence.
But maybe they’re basically identical questions?