Life is not a prerequisite for intelligence

GPT can be implemented in less than 100 lines of code.

I’m not sure anyone actually understands the implications of this.

We have, through empirical experiments, shown that there exist relatively simple systems where if you feed them sufficient amounts of data, they will become as intelligent the data allows. The threshold is at most threshold is at most some tens of billions of repeating “units”, possibly less, organized in a way that follows a gradient and settles on local optimum state (which many physical processes do naturally).

This is obviously less complicated than the simplest lifeforms we know on Earth!!

So, we have basically proven that life is not a prerequisite for (non-trivial, quasi-human-level) intelligence, and that intelligence can be structurally less complex than life.

Think about all the possibilities. Elementals, Nature Spirits, Gaia, God…

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PS: The above was written upon a spurt of inspiration. We probably need to qualify and quantify things a bit -

• 100 lines of python code is a small number, but python itself is complicated. However, it seems that less efficient neural networks can be coded up in very few lines of C code, which can have 1-1 mappings to a bare metal computer architecture - https://www.ioccc.org/2019/mills/hint.html
• It takes clusters of very fast computers to train an AI to human-like levels of intelligence. However, a slow system will just take a long time to achieve the same. On cosmic scales this isn’t necessarily a problem.
• I subsequently quickly looked up the size of the genome of the smallest living organism, and it’s on the order of 500kbp ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoarchaeum_equitans ). It’s probably an order or two smaller than what I had in mind, but I think I was lucky I wasn’t outright wrong in this case.