There is nothing in principle that stops a chimpanzee from being able to read and write English, for example. It’s just that we haven’t figured out the methods to configure their brains into that state
Do you think there’s an upper bound on how well a chimp could read and write?
I’d say there virtually must be an upper bound. As to where this upper bound is, you could do the following back-of-the-napkin calculation.
ChatGPT is pretty good at reading and writing and it has something on the order of 100 billion to 1,000 billion parameters, one for each artificial synapse. A human brain has on the order of 100,000 billion natural synapses and a chimpanzee brain has about a third of that. If we could roughly equate artificial and natural synapses, it seems that a chimpanzee brain should in principle be able to model reading and writing as well as ChatGPT and then some. But then you’d have to devise a training method to set the strengths of natural synapses as desired.
Do you think there’s an upper bound on how well a chimp could read and write?
I’d say there virtually must be an upper bound. As to where this upper bound is, you could do the following back-of-the-napkin calculation.
ChatGPT is pretty good at reading and writing and it has something on the order of 100 billion to 1,000 billion parameters, one for each artificial synapse. A human brain has on the order of 100,000 billion natural synapses and a chimpanzee brain has about a third of that. If we could roughly equate artificial and natural synapses, it seems that a chimpanzee brain should in principle be able to model reading and writing as well as ChatGPT and then some. But then you’d have to devise a training method to set the strengths of natural synapses as desired.