As you note, Arthur Clarke identified this in 1973, and it holds up: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” GPT2 is pretty close to “just math”. Current frontier models are sufficiently advanced and indistinguishable from magic. As we study them and learn more, and develop more methods for introspecting their behavior, they’ll become “just math”, in the same way that, say heavier-than-air flight is. But by then, there will be newer/bigger/harder-to-trace mechanisms that are indistinguishable from magic.
It’s quite likely that human brains will become “just math” at some point in the future as well. Until then, “magic” is a fine handle for “amazing and coherent high-level behaviors that we can’t explain from lower-level observations/mechanics.
As you note, Arthur Clarke identified this in 1973, and it holds up: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” GPT2 is pretty close to “just math”. Current frontier models are sufficiently advanced and indistinguishable from magic. As we study them and learn more, and develop more methods for introspecting their behavior, they’ll become “just math”, in the same way that, say heavier-than-air flight is. But by then, there will be newer/bigger/harder-to-trace mechanisms that are indistinguishable from magic.
It’s quite likely that human brains will become “just math” at some point in the future as well. Until then, “magic” is a fine handle for “amazing and coherent high-level behaviors that we can’t explain from lower-level observations/mechanics.