After years on the fence, I'm convinced conscious machine intelligence is just a few architectural changes away.

I've been using Ai a lot the last few years and over the last few months I'm increasingly convinced that we are just a few architectural changes away from real machine intelligence. LLM's are "just next word predictors" is a phrase you'll hear a lot. It's a stochastic parrot. And while there are a lot of things that might defend that point of view I think it should be very obvious that it's a hand wave that doesn't even make an attempt at understanding what these models are actually doing.