Please show me where the training data exists in the model to perform this lookup operation you’re supposing. If it’s that easy I’m sure you could reimplement it with a simple vector database.
Your last two paragraphs are just dualism in disguise.
Question is, wouldn't a brain qualify as a spreadsheet, do we know it can't be implemented as one? Well, maybe not, I'm not an expert on spreadsheets either, but I think spreadsheets don't allow you circular references, and brain does, you can have feedback loops in the brain. So even if the brain doesn't have something still not understood by us, that OP suggests, it still is more powerful than AI.
BTW, this is one explanation on why AI fails at some tasks: ask AI if two words rhyme and it will be quite reliable on that. But ask it to give you word pairs that rhyme, and it will fail, because it won't run an internal loop trying some words and checking if they succeed to rhyme or not. If some AI actually succeeds at rhyming, it would do so either because it's trained to contain such word pairs from the get-go or because it's implemented to have multiple passes or something...
Which LLMs can’t produce rhyming pairs? Both the current ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 seem to be able to generate as many as I ask for. Was this a failure mode at some point?
Only in english. If they would understand language and rhymes they would do it in every other language it knows, It can't in my language while it can speak in it fluently. It just fails. And fails in so many other areas, I'm using LLMs daily for work and other stuff and if you use them long enough you will see that they are statistical machines not intelligent entities.
What I'm saying is arguably philosophically related, in that I'm saying the LLM's model is analogous to the "response book" in the room. It doesn't matter how big the book is; if the book never changes, then no learning can happen. If no learning can happen, then understanding, a process that necessarily involves active reflection on a topic, can exist.
You simply can't say a book "understands" anything. To understand is to contemplate and mentally model a topic to the point where you can simulate it, at least at a high level. It's dynamic.
An LLM is static. It can simulate a dynamic response by having multiple stages that dig through an multiple insanely large books of instructions that cross reference each other and that involve calculations and bookmarks and such to come up with a result--but the books never change as part of the conversation.
