Whilst I agree there are likely better uses for the worlds greatest minds, I can think of 5 commercial applications for this paper alone. It is very useful.
I would not disagree that there are commercial applications for knowing what are the most statistically used set of words (potentially) with games being the #1 use case I think.
But for actual intelligence, that is understanding the world, it is not helpful at all.
"Knowing what are the most statistically used set of words that a human would say next that are consistent with the things they have said before" is equivalent to general intelligence.
The alternative is to believe that intelligence is not required to generate human speech. At which point, why would I believe anyone on here is intelligent? All I have of you is speech.
I think you fully missed my point. Intelligence involves conceptually understanding a space/time model of the world such that you can use the word data as input to then create that model in your mind and compute with it. The words alone are just data and have no ability as data to build a conceptual/causal space/time model of what those words mean. So knowing statistics about words = statistics about words. It has nothing to do with understanding what the words mean = intelligence
By the same metric, humans only know statistics about photons and pressure waves, which obviously has nothing to do with actually existing objects. I don't see why we should call our statistics "intelligence" and the network's statistics "statistics".
