Comment by calf

That's not the counterargument one might wish, as LLM deep nets are actually implemented on von Neumann hardware, without true understanding of natural intelligence, just our taking inspiration from neurobiology.

The connectionist models are basically a proposed highest possible abstraction of naturally evolved intelligences so it is in retrospect not surprising that passing some hardware scaling threshold they will start doing things that humans and animals do

It's more that formal Turing equivalence plus the Church-Turing thesis tells us that we're not allowed to assume counterarguments based on magic, there's no magic sauce barrier that prevents AI from running on CPU models. The algorithms exist and most of us thought discovering them would be hard.

The empirical surprise was that human intelligence is maybe not that computationally complex after all. (The entirety of academia was basically caught off guard.) That's one not unreasonable interpretation given recent events.