AI brains are not like ours

How useful—or dangerous—will A.I. turn out to be? No one knows for sure, in part because neural nets are so strange. In the twentieth century, many researchers wanted to build computers that mimicked brains. But, although neural nets like OpenAI’s GPT models are brainlike in that they involve billions of artificial neurons, they’re actually profoundly different from biological brains. Today’s A.I.s are based in the cloud and housed in data centers that use power on an industrial scale. Clueless in some ways and savantlike in others, they reason for millions of users, but only when prompted. They are not alive. They have probably passed the Turing test—the long-heralded standard, established by the computing pioneer Alan Turing, which held that any computer that could persuasively imitate a human in conversation could be said, reasonably, to think. And yet our intuitions may tell us that nothing resident in a browser tab could really be thinking in the way we do. The systems force us to ask if our kind of thinking is the only kind that counts.