CNNs excel in vision tasks where you have limited compute, limited memory, limited data, and want something that works super well and quick. People usually don't hook CNNs up to a transformer to get language understanding either, you have to train bespoke CNNs for specific tasks
ViTs excel where you're unbounded in compute + data and also want text understanding or have a conversation about an image
I spent part of my life growing up in a major Asian city where communal ties are very strong, and spent a very significant fraction of my childhood outside of my house, just because there was so much to do - whether it was playing soccer, playing hide and seek, or taking the local bus/train with friends to shows, coffee shops or restaurants. All of this was before cell phones. If I got lost or needed help I'd ask a stranger for directions or navigation.
Nothing bad ever happened to me, and most people were actually quite kind and helpful to a 14 year old kid asking for help and directions. That sense of confidence in myself - that I could figure out how to pretty much do anything - has stuck with me in a way that a lot of my friends who grew up in sanitized suburban neighborhoods just don't have.
My PhD advisor found out that my English writing skills are quite good and the rest of their lab were Chinese internationals, so they started making me write all of their research grants. 30 pages every 2 months, pre-ChatGPT days.
Unfortunately, consciousness is deceptively hard to define, and so any benchmark to measure or quantify it can be endlessly debated.
You can argue that it's a property that all living beings have in common - and even among *unconscious* beings there's a form of consciousness and self-awareness that's ever present, but definitions are elusive and vague and tough to pin down.
The mechanistic argument against LLMs - that they're just matrix multiplications - breaks down because they can clearly pass the Turing Test which was the gold standard for what intelligent behavior really meant, thus breaking the old notion that intelligence has to have some form of biological basis. Yet its clear that there are forms of intelligence that rats have which the frontier LLMs don't possess (is that consciousness? or a different kind of intelligence), and its hard to pinpoint what exactly that is, so we probably need the philosophy departments of major universities to come up with newer definitions of intelligence and consciousness.
I personally believe that intelligence and consciousness are 2 separate forms of emergence from simple automata that may occur together (such as in humans) or not (such as consciousness in plants and intelligence in LLMs)
Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.
The whole point of Apple intelligence is that it shouldn’t feel like you’re talking with an LLM, it’s that it fades into the OS but delivers new features that make the OS more intelligent. I’m actually very bullish on it