How GPT Realizes Leibniz’s Dream and Passes the Turing Test without Being Conscious ^†

This article addresses the background and nature of the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), tracing the history of their fundamental concepts from Leibniz and his calculus ratiocinator to Turing’s computational models of learning, and ultimately to the current development of GPTs. As Kahneman’s “System 1”-type processes, GPTs lack mechanisms that would render them conscious, but they nonetheless demonstrate a certain level of intelligence and the capacity to represent and process knowledge. This is achieved by processing vast corpora of human-created knowledge, which, for its initial production, required human consciousness, but can now be collected, compressed, and processed automatically.