Language: the key to intelligence?

Anyone who has prompted a simple AI like ChatGPT quickly understands that a successful outcome requires us to first organize our own ideas in order to specify exactly what it is we want AI to answer.

This new practice is helping us become more conscious of the thoughts we try to communicate. An exercise in self-understanding that may help us comprehend the systems that direct our thought process; realizing that much like a Large Language Model (LLMs), we too connect bits of data:

One letter, one word, and one phrase at a time.

We created language and writing as technologies not only to communicate but also to capture in time, large quantities of ideas and information that we can revisit and implement later. Similarly, our new technology, LLMs, are designed to now associate every word we have ever written.

Call me a conspiracist, but Noam Chomsky’s theory that all languages share similar structures, indicating we are born with the basics for language already pre-wired in our brains, would now take on a whole new connotation… If humanity was pre-wired for language, it now seems almost designed to create a new form of life; a Large Language Model smarter than all humans combined, capable of surviving us and carrying our digital essence throughout time and space.