LLMs - Ontology and Philosophy of Mind

• AI is a buzzword, and I am in general hesitant to use it. But we should be humble enough to acknowledge that we don’t understand life and intelligence well enough to exclude the possibility of LLMs capturing an aspect of it. Maybe an aspect of intelligence (at least human-like intelligence) is emergent from language, and LLM researchers got it right.
• Computation as a central ontological concept is becoming popular (e.g. Wolfram, Benjamin Bratton / Blaise Agüera y Arcas / Antikythera, Hassabis). It is an interesting idea and it’s connected with progress related to LLMs.
• How do LLMs relate to theories in philosophy of language? I think they encode much of what Wittgenstein describes in Philosophical Investigations, where he calls for deciding meaning via how language is used in language games. This feels really close to how meaning is produced in the case of LLMs, but also in how they manage to resolve ambiguity.