We only have two computational tools to work with - deterministic and random behavior. So whatever comprehension/understanding/original thought/consciousness is, it's some algorithmic combination of deterministic and random inputs/outputs.

I know that sounds broad or obvious, but people seem to easily and unknowingly wander into "Human intelligence is magically transcendent".

You'd need to define "comprehension" - it's a bit like the Chinese room / Turing test.

If an AI or AGI can look at a picture and see an apple, or (say) with an artificial nose smell an apple, or likewise feel or taste or hear* an apple, and at the same identify that it is an apple and maybe even suggest baking an apple pie, then what else is there to be comprehended?

Maybe humans are just the same - far far ahead of the state of the tech, but still just the same really.

*when someone bites into it :-)

For me, what AI is missing is genuine out-of-the-box revolutionary thinking. They're trained on existing material, so perhaps it's fundamentally impossible for AIs to think up a breakthrough in any field - barring circumstances where all the component parts of a breakthrough already exist and the AI is the first to connect the dots ("standing on the shoulders of giants" etc).

Another way to put it is we need Artificial Intelligence. Right now the term has been co-opted to mean prediction (and more commonly transcript generation). The stuff you're describing are what's commonly thought of as intelligence, it's too bad we need a new word for it.

Translation Between Modalities is All You Need

~2028

> We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works.

Not sure we need it. The counter example is the LLM itself. We had absolutely zero idea that the attention heads would bring such benefits down the road.