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Why does AI have to be smarter than the collective of hummanity in order to be considered intelligent? It seems like we keep raising the bar on what intelligenc

Why does AI have to be smarter than the collective of hummanity in order to be considered intelligent? It seems like we keep raising the bar on what intelligence means ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

willis936 2y ago
A machine that synthesizes all human knowledge really ought to know more than an individual in terms of intellect. An entity with all of human intellect prior to 1905 does not need to be as intelligent as a human to make discoveries that mere humans with limited intellect made. Why lower the bar?
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  The heightening of the bar is an attempt to deny that milestones were surpassed and to claim that LLMs are not intelligent. We had a threshold for intelligence. An LLM blew past it and people refuse to believe that we passed a critical milestone in creating AI. Everyone still thinks all an LLM does is regurgitate things. But a technical threshold for intelligence cannot have any leeway for what people want to believe. They don’t want to define an LLM as intelligent even if it meets the Turing test technical definition of intelligence so they change the technical definition. And then they keep doing this without realizing and trivializing it. I believe humanity will develop an entity smarter than humans but it will not be an agi because people keep unconsciously moving the goal posts and changing definitions without realizing it.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    Since we know an LLM does indeed simply regurgitate data, having it pass a "test for intelligence" simply means that either the test didn't actually test intelligence, or that intelligence can be defined as simply regurgitating data.
    - greentxt 2y ago
      Intelligence is debateble without even bringing ai into it. Nobody agrees on whether humans have intelligence. Well, smart people agree but those people also agree we have or will soon have agi or something negligibly different from it.
      - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
        > Intelligence is debateble without even bringing ai into it. Nobody agrees on whether humans have intelligence. Yep, that constitutes the second of the two options I mentioned. > Well, smart people agree but those people also agree we have or will soon have agi or something negligibly different from it. lol, the ol' "I know what all smart people think and it's what I think" appeal.
  - klabb3 2y ago
    Disagree. The AI we have is very useful for specific things. The pushback you see is not so much denying the milestones that have been surpassed, but rather the milestones that enthusiasts claim are near. And for good reason! Every time and in every field we’ve extrapolated an exponential-looking curve ad infinitum, it’s turned out to be S-shaped, and life goes on. > We had a threshold for intelligence. We’ve had many. Computers have surpassed several barriers considered to require intelligence such as arithmetic, guided search like chess computers, etc etc. the Turing test was a good benchmark because of how foreign and strange it was. It’s somewhat true we’re moving the goalposts. But the reason is not stubbornness, but rather that we can’t properly define and subcategorize what reason and intelligence really is. The difficulty to measure something does not mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t important. Feel free to call it intelligence. But the limitations are staggering, given the advantages LLMs have over humans. They have been trained on all written knowledge that no human could ever come close to. And they still have not come up with anything conceptually novel, such as a new idea or theorem that is genuinely useful. Many people suspect that pattern matching is not the only thing required for intelligent independent thought. Whatever that is!
    - redman25 2y ago
      If you consider that evolution has taken millions of years to produce intelligent humans--that LLM training completed in a manner of months can produce parrots of humans is impressive by itself. Talking with the parrot is almost indistinguishable from talking with a real human. As far as pattern matching, the difference I see from humans is consciousness. That's probably the main area yet to be solved. All of our current models are static. Some ideas for where that might be headed: - Maybe all it takes is to allow an LLM to continuously talk with itself much like how humans have "the milk man's voice". - Maybe we might need to allow LLMs to update their own weights but that would also require an "objective" which might be hard to encode.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        > If you consider that evolution has taken millions of years to produce intelligent humans--that LLM training completed in a manner of months can produce parrots of humans is impressive by itself. I disagree that such a comparison is useful. Training should be compared to training, and LLM training feeds in so many more words than a baby gets. (A baby has other senses but it's not like feeding in 20 years of video footage is going to make an LLM more competent.)
  - zahlman 2y ago
    > The heightening of the bar is an attempt to deny that milestones were surpassed and to claim that LLMs are not intelligent. That was never "the bar"; nobody denies that milestones have been surpassed; none of those milestones are relevant to the question of intelligence. > We had a threshold for intelligence. An LLM blew past it and people refuse to believe Have you ever actually looked at contemporary (to Turing) examples of what people thought "passing a Turing test" might look like? It's abundantly clear to me that we were simply wrong about what the output would have to look like in order to convince human judges in the 2020s. Even examples from much more recently (see e.g. on http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminar/1213/Hawke_TuringTest.pdf http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminar/1213/Hawke_TuringTest....) suggest a very different approach to the test than prompting ChatGPT and marveling at the technical accuracy of its prose. (Exercise: ask an LLM to write a refutation to your comment from the perspective of a human AI skeptic. Notice the ways in which it differs from mine.) > Everyone still thinks all an LLM does is regurgitate things. No; people still think LLMs aren't intelligent. Because they aren't, and they cannot become so in principle. They can do many things that are clearly beyond "regurgitation" (as we would otherwise apply the word to computer programs), but none of those things are the result of intelligence. Producing a result that could plausibly come from an intelligent system does not, in fact, demonstrate that the actual system producing it is also intelligent. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism wasn't intelligent, either, and applying a power source to turn the gears wouldn't have made it so, either. > They don’t want to define an LLM as intelligent even if it meets the Turing test technical definition of intelligence so they change the technical definition. The Turing Test was never a "technical definition" of intelligence. Turing's original paper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intell...) spoke of "thinking" rather than "intelligence". Besides, the "Imitation Game" is presented as a substitute problem exactly because "think" cannot be clearly enough defined for the purposes. The entire point: > As Stevan Harnad notes,[7] the question has become "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" In other words, Turing is no longer asking whether a machine can "think"; he is asking whether a machine can act indistinguishably[8] from the way a thinker acts. This question avoids the difficult philosophical problem of pre-defining the verb "to think" and focuses instead on the performance capacities that being able to think makes possible, and how a causal system can generate them. But the usual processes of pop science seem to have created a folk wisdom that being able to pass a Turing test logically ought to imply intelligence. This idea is what has been disproven, not the AI skepticism.
- 343rwerfd 2y ago
  "Why lower the bar?" Because of the chance of misundertanding. Failing at acknowledging artificial general intelligence standing right next to us. An incredible risk to take in alignment. Perfect memory doesn't equal to perfect knowledge, nor perfect understanding of everything you can know. In fact, a human can be "intelligent" with some of his own memories and/or knowledge, and - more commmonly - a complete "fool" with most of the rest of his internal memories. That said, is not a bit less generally intelligent for that. Supose it exists a human with unlimited memory, it retains every information touching any sense. At some point, he/she will probably understand LOTs of stuff, but it's simple to demonstrate he/she can't be actually proficient in everything: you have read how do an eye repairment surgery, but have not received/experimented the training,hence you could have shaky hands, and you won't be able to apply the precise know-how about the surgery, even if you remember a step-by-step procedure, even knowing all possible alternatives in different/changing scenarios during the surgery, you simply can't hold well the tools to go anywhere close to success. But you still would be generally intelligent. Way more than most humans with normal memory. If we'd have TODAY an AI with the same parameters as the human with perfect memory, it will be most certainly closely examined and determined to be not a general artificial intelligence.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > If we'd have TODAY an AI with the same parameters as the human with perfect memory, it will be most certainly closely examined and determined to be not a general artificial intelligence. The human could learn to master a task, current AI can't. That is very different, the AI doesn't learn to remember stuff they are stateless. When I can take an AI and get it to do any job on its own without any intervention after some training then that is AGI. The person you mentioned would pass that easily. Current day AI aren't even close.

Why does AI have to be smarter than the collective of hummanity in order to be considered intelligent? It seems like we keep raising the bar on what intelligence means ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

willis936 2y ago

A machine that synthesizes all human knowledge really ought to know more than an individual in terms of intellect. An entity with all of human intellect prior to 1905 does not need to be as intelligent as a human to make discoveries that mere humans with limited intellect made. Why lower the bar?

ninetyninenine 2y ago
The heightening of the bar is an attempt to deny that milestones were surpassed and to claim that LLMs are not intelligent. We had a threshold for intelligence. An LLM blew past it and people refuse to believe that we passed a critical milestone in creating AI. Everyone still thinks all an LLM does is regurgitate things. But a technical threshold for intelligence cannot have any leeway for what people want to believe. They don’t want to define an LLM as intelligent even if it meets the Turing test technical definition of intelligence so they change the technical definition. And then they keep doing this without realizing and trivializing it. I believe humanity will develop an entity smarter than humans but it will not be an agi because people keep unconsciously moving the goal posts and changing definitions without realizing it.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  Since we know an LLM does indeed simply regurgitate data, having it pass a "test for intelligence" simply means that either the test didn't actually test intelligence, or that intelligence can be defined as simply regurgitating data.
  - greentxt 2y ago
    Intelligence is debateble without even bringing ai into it. Nobody agrees on whether humans have intelligence. Well, smart people agree but those people also agree we have or will soon have agi or something negligibly different from it.
    - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
      > Intelligence is debateble without even bringing ai into it. Nobody agrees on whether humans have intelligence. Yep, that constitutes the second of the two options I mentioned. > Well, smart people agree but those people also agree we have or will soon have agi or something negligibly different from it. lol, the ol' "I know what all smart people think and it's what I think" appeal.
- klabb3 2y ago
  Disagree. The AI we have is very useful for specific things. The pushback you see is not so much denying the milestones that have been surpassed, but rather the milestones that enthusiasts claim are near. And for good reason! Every time and in every field we’ve extrapolated an exponential-looking curve ad infinitum, it’s turned out to be S-shaped, and life goes on. > We had a threshold for intelligence. We’ve had many. Computers have surpassed several barriers considered to require intelligence such as arithmetic, guided search like chess computers, etc etc. the Turing test was a good benchmark because of how foreign and strange it was. It’s somewhat true we’re moving the goalposts. But the reason is not stubbornness, but rather that we can’t properly define and subcategorize what reason and intelligence really is. The difficulty to measure something does not mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t important. Feel free to call it intelligence. But the limitations are staggering, given the advantages LLMs have over humans. They have been trained on all written knowledge that no human could ever come close to. And they still have not come up with anything conceptually novel, such as a new idea or theorem that is genuinely useful. Many people suspect that pattern matching is not the only thing required for intelligent independent thought. Whatever that is!
  - redman25 2y ago
    If you consider that evolution has taken millions of years to produce intelligent humans--that LLM training completed in a manner of months can produce parrots of humans is impressive by itself. Talking with the parrot is almost indistinguishable from talking with a real human. As far as pattern matching, the difference I see from humans is consciousness. That's probably the main area yet to be solved. All of our current models are static. Some ideas for where that might be headed: - Maybe all it takes is to allow an LLM to continuously talk with itself much like how humans have "the milk man's voice". - Maybe we might need to allow LLMs to update their own weights but that would also require an "objective" which might be hard to encode.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > If you consider that evolution has taken millions of years to produce intelligent humans--that LLM training completed in a manner of months can produce parrots of humans is impressive by itself. I disagree that such a comparison is useful. Training should be compared to training, and LLM training feeds in so many more words than a baby gets. (A baby has other senses but it's not like feeding in 20 years of video footage is going to make an LLM more competent.)
- zahlman 2y ago
  > The heightening of the bar is an attempt to deny that milestones were surpassed and to claim that LLMs are not intelligent. That was never "the bar"; nobody denies that milestones have been surpassed; none of those milestones are relevant to the question of intelligence. > We had a threshold for intelligence. An LLM blew past it and people refuse to believe Have you ever actually looked at contemporary (to Turing) examples of what people thought "passing a Turing test" might look like? It's abundantly clear to me that we were simply wrong about what the output would have to look like in order to convince human judges in the 2020s. Even examples from much more recently (see e.g. on http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminar/1213/Hawke_TuringTest.pdf http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminar/1213/Hawke_TuringTest....) suggest a very different approach to the test than prompting ChatGPT and marveling at the technical accuracy of its prose. (Exercise: ask an LLM to write a refutation to your comment from the perspective of a human AI skeptic. Notice the ways in which it differs from mine.) > Everyone still thinks all an LLM does is regurgitate things. No; people still think LLMs aren't intelligent. Because they aren't, and they cannot become so in principle. They can do many things that are clearly beyond "regurgitation" (as we would otherwise apply the word to computer programs), but none of those things are the result of intelligence. Producing a result that could plausibly come from an intelligent system does not, in fact, demonstrate that the actual system producing it is also intelligent. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism wasn't intelligent, either, and applying a power source to turn the gears wouldn't have made it so, either. > They don’t want to define an LLM as intelligent even if it meets the Turing test technical definition of intelligence so they change the technical definition. The Turing Test was never a "technical definition" of intelligence. Turing's original paper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intell...) spoke of "thinking" rather than "intelligence". Besides, the "Imitation Game" is presented as a substitute problem exactly because "think" cannot be clearly enough defined for the purposes. The entire point: > As Stevan Harnad notes,[7] the question has become "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" In other words, Turing is no longer asking whether a machine can "think"; he is asking whether a machine can act indistinguishably[8] from the way a thinker acts. This question avoids the difficult philosophical problem of pre-defining the verb "to think" and focuses instead on the performance capacities that being able to think makes possible, and how a causal system can generate them. But the usual processes of pop science seem to have created a folk wisdom that being able to pass a Turing test logically ought to imply intelligence. This idea is what has been disproven, not the AI skepticism.
343rwerfd 2y ago
"Why lower the bar?" Because of the chance of misundertanding. Failing at acknowledging artificial general intelligence standing right next to us. An incredible risk to take in alignment. Perfect memory doesn't equal to perfect knowledge, nor perfect understanding of everything you can know. In fact, a human can be "intelligent" with some of his own memories and/or knowledge, and - more commmonly - a complete "fool" with most of the rest of his internal memories. That said, is not a bit less generally intelligent for that. Supose it exists a human with unlimited memory, it retains every information touching any sense. At some point, he/she will probably understand LOTs of stuff, but it's simple to demonstrate he/she can't be actually proficient in everything: you have read how do an eye repairment surgery, but have not received/experimented the training,hence you could have shaky hands, and you won't be able to apply the precise know-how about the surgery, even if you remember a step-by-step procedure, even knowing all possible alternatives in different/changing scenarios during the surgery, you simply can't hold well the tools to go anywhere close to success. But you still would be generally intelligent. Way more than most humans with normal memory. If we'd have TODAY an AI with the same parameters as the human with perfect memory, it will be most certainly closely examined and determined to be not a general artificial intelligence.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > If we'd have TODAY an AI with the same parameters as the human with perfect memory, it will be most certainly closely examined and determined to be not a general artificial intelligence. The human could learn to master a task, current AI can't. That is very different, the AI doesn't learn to remember stuff they are stateless. When I can take an AI and get it to do any job on its own without any intervention after some training then that is AGI. The person you mentioned would pass that easily. Current day AI aren't even close.