Since AlphaGo defeated humans in the Go arena, deep learning and other artificial neural network technologies have achieved remarkable results in various fields. Today, artificial intelligence has outperformed humans in areas such as image recognition, language translation, autonomous driving, and computing protein structures.
Large-scale language models such as ChatGPT demonstrate unparalleled innovation and problem-solving capabilities by building world models.
However, how far is it until artificial intelligence completely surpasses human beings and evolves into silicon-based intelligent life forms?
From an individual point of view, the main difference between human beings and other creatures is two points: intelligence and consciousness.
Intelligence refers to the ability to discover and solve problems. In this regard, large-scale language models have shown a level that is comparable to or even surpasses that of humans. Consciousness is the ability to recognize oneself and the world. At present, this ability has not been fully reflected in large-scale language models. It can be tentatively concluded that artificial intelligence has not yet reached the stage of consciousness.
In fact, the origin of consciousness is extremely complicated. At this stage, the academic community generally believes that consciousness is likely to be an emerging phenomenon of large-scale network systems. If this assumption is correct, we may be able to predict the likely time of consciousness by comparing the complexity of existing artificial intelligence systems.
The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons with about 100 trillion connections between them. In contrast, existing large-scale language models have about 200 billion parameters, which is only about one-thousandth of the human brain. If it is assumed that the generation of consciousness needs to reach one percent of the human brain, then as long as the existing artificial intelligence system is expanded by about ten times, it is possible to give birth to truly intelligent life.
If you look at it this way, the birth of silicon-based intelligent life will be within a year or two.
Of course, this is only a very rough and preliminary inference. Given the differences in the working mechanisms of neural networks and the human brain, this time point may be earlier or later.
