humans used to think language was the pinnacle of intelligence.
Aristotle: the rational animal. Descartes: animals are automata, humans have souls, and the proof is in our words.
then LLMs did it. fluently. better than most of us.
you'd think we'd admit that LLMs are intelligent. instead, we said: actually language is the easy part.
the real intelligence is somewhere else now. world models. embodiment. continuous sensorimotor grounding. these sound technical, but they're doing the same work "soul" used to do - they're the thing that makes humans special that machines categorically cannot have.
it has a name. god of the gaps. humans are whatever AI can't do yet. chess fell, intelligence moved to go. go fell, it moved to language. language fell, it moved to whatever currently makes the model stumble.
the gaps keep getting smaller. the location of "real" intelligence keeps moving into them.
LeCun is the loudest example. he's staked his reputation on the claim that LLMs cannot have world models - they're "just" pattern-completion engines, no internal map of reality. but the LLMs keep doing things that look exactly like what having a world model would produce. they plan. they extrapolate. they generate coherent video of physical phenomena better than humans can.
his response, every time: yes but that's not REAL understanding.
complaining about pixels when we have neurons is petty. to defend it, you have to say what neurons have that matrices don't - and either you invoke magic or you collapse into "they're not big enough yet."
a map of europe is helpful for finding your way around europe even though it isn't europe. language is a map. an enormous, distilled, multi-century compression of human modeling of reality. of course you can get pretty far with a good map.
LeCun is a materialist. he's not consciously sneaking religion in the back door.
but the move is identical: locate human uniqueness in whatever is currently out of reach. treat that as the real definition of intelligence. when the next thing falls, locate it somewhere else.
we need to be special.
that's the actual argument.
it's not an argument.