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You can make a human do the same task as an LLM: given what you've received (or written) so far, output one character. You would be totally capable of intellige
by chpatrick 3y ago
You can make a human do the same task as an LLM: given what you've received (or written) so far, output one character. You would be totally capable of intelligent communication like this (it's pretty much how I'm talking to you now), so just the method of generating characters isn't proof of whether you're intelligent or not, and it doesn't invalidate LLMs either.
This "LLMs are just fancy autocomplete so they're not intelligent" is just as bad an argument as saying "LLMs communicate with text instead of making noises by flapping their tongues so they're not intelligent". Sufficiently advanced autocomplete is indistinguishable from intelligence.
- evantbyrne 3y agoThe question isn't whether LLMs can simulate human intelligence, I think that is well-established. Many aspects of human nature are a mystery, but a technology that by design produces random outputs based on a seed number does not meet the criteria of human intelligence.
- chpatrick 3y agoWhy? People also produce somewhat random outputs, so?
- evantbyrne 3y agoA lot of things are going to look the same when you aren't wearing your glasses. You don't even appear to be trying to describe these things in a realistic fashion. There is nothing of substance in this argument.
- chpatrick 3y agoLook, let's say you have a black box that outputs one character at a time in a semi-random way and you don't know if there's a person sitting inside or if it's an LLM. How can you decide if it's intelligent or not?
- evantbyrne 3y agoI appreciate the philosophical direction you're trying to take this conversation, but I just don't find discussing the core subject matter in such an overly generalized manner to be stimulating.
- chpatrick 3y agoThe original argument by vineyardmike was "LLMs are a next character predictor, therefore they are not intelligent". I'm saying that as a human you can restrict yourself to a being a next character predictor, yet you can still communicate intelligently. What part do you disagree with?
- evantbyrne 3y agoI'm not sure what point you think you are making by arguing with the worst possible interpretations of our comments. Clearly intelligence refers to more than just being able to put unicode to paper in this context. The subject matter of this thread was a LLM's inability to perform basic tasks involving analytical reasoning.
- chpatrick 3y agoNo, that's shifting the goalposts. The original claim was that LLMs cannot possibly be intelligent due to some detail of how they output the result ("smarter autocorrect").
- Jensson 3y ago> I'm saying that as a human you can restrict yourself to a being a next character predictor A smart entity being able to emulate a dumber entity doesn't support in any way that the dumber entity is also smart.
- chpatrick 3y agoSure, but the original argument was that next-character-prediction implies lack of intelligence, which is clearly not true when a human is doing it. That doesn't mean LLMs are intelligent, just that you can't claim they're unintelligent just because they generate one character at a time.