GPT-4 is not a stochastic parrot, nor a blurry jpeg of the web, nor an evil Lovecraftian “shoggoth,” nor some cartoon Waluigi. The simple but best metaphor for GPT-4 is that it’s a dormant digital neocortex trained on human data just sitting there waiting for someone to prompt it. Everything about AI, both what’s happened so far with the technology, as well as where the danger lies, as well as the common blindspots of AI risk deniers, all click into place once you begin to think of GPT-4 as a digital neocortexthe high-level thinking part of the brain.