Machina Sapiens: How Intelligent Machines Passed the Turing Test

Can machines think? This troubling question, posed by Alan Turing in 1950, has perhaps been answered: today we can converse with a computer without being able to distinguish it from a person.

Machines can pass university exams and program other computers. ChatGPT, Bard, and other 'language models' have proved proficient at performing tasks far beyond their creators’ initial expectations, and we still do not know why. Trained simply to predict missing words in a text, such models have gained ...