Is there a limit to human knowledge and understanding?

Let's try an experiment:

Me: What is the theme song to Gilligan's Island?

ChatGPT:

The theme song to *Gilligan's Island* is titled "The Ballad of Gilligan's Isle." The lyrics were written by Sherwood Schwartz, the show's creator, and the music was composed by George Wyle. The song's lyrics introduce the main characters and set up the premise of the show, where a group of castaways are stranded on an uncharted island after a shipwreck. The theme song became iconic and is often associated with the show.

Here’s a portion of the lyrics:

*"Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,

A tale of a fateful trip,

That started from this tropic port,

Aboard this tiny ship."*

The song continues to describe how the ship, the S.S. Minnow, was caught in a storm, leading to the crew and passengers being stranded on the island.

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It is important to note here that ChatGPT functions in a way somewhat analogous to the human brain. There is no specific database that it consults to look this information up. Instead, ChatGPT has studied vast amounts of text data and learned enough to accurately respond to a wide variety of questions, including my fairly arbitrary one about Gilligan's Island.

If we think of this process as a form of lossy data compression, where vast quantities of information are distilled into a much smaller, more efficient form, ChatGPT has achieved an astonishing compression ratio—likely better than 1000:1. The primary limit on this compression ratio is intelligence. The more intelligent a neural network is, the less it needs to memorize exact information and the more it can derive from general patterns within that information.

Humans still have a neural network that is 10 to 100 times more intelligent than ChatGPT. Yet, despite this, ChatGPT has managed to learn every written language, understand most cultural references, and even pass difficult exams like the medical licensing exam and the bar exam. If humans could fully realize our potential, these achievements would be trivial for each of us.

I don't know what the ultimate limits of human intelligence are, but it's clear that we are nowhere near reaching them.