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By the way, don’t call it “AI.” That catchall phrase, which used to cover everything from expert systems and neural networks to robotics and vision systems, is
by card_zero 1y ago
By the way, don’t call it “AI.” That catchall phrase, which used to cover everything from expert systems and neural networks to robotics and vision systems, is now passe in some circles. The preferred terms now are “knowledge-based systems” and “intelligent systems”, claimed Computerworld magazine in 1991.
https://archive.org/details/computerworld2530unse/page/59/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/computerworld2530unse/page/59/mo...
- ACCount37 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- card_zero 1y agoUh-huh. If you call it artificial intelligence people quibble, as they should.
- ACCount37 1y agoI disagree entirely. I think that this "quibble" is just cope. People don't want machines to infringe on their precious "intelligence". So for any notable AI advance, they rush to come up with a reason why it's "not ackhtually intelligent". Even if those machines obviously do the kind of tasks that were entirely exclusive to humans just a few years ago. Or were in the realm of "machines would never be able to do this" a few years ago.
- card_zero 1y agoI for one am a counter-example. I'd be delighted by the discovery of actual artificial intelligence, which is obviously possible in principle.
- ACCount37 1y agoAnd what would that "actual artificial intelligence" be, pray tell me? What is this magical, impossible-to-capture thing that disqualifies LLMs?
- card_zero 1y agoWell, fuck knows. However, that doesn't automatically make this a "no true Scotsman" argument. Sometimes we just don't know an answer. Here's a question for you, actually: what's the criterion for being non-intelligent?
- ACCount37 1y ago"Fuck knows" is a wrong answer if I've ever seen one. If you don't have anything attached to your argument, then it's just "LLMs are not intelligent because I said so". I, for one, don't think that "intelligence" can be a binary distinction. Most AIs are incredibly narrow though - entirely constrained to specific tasks in narrow domains. LLMs are the first "general intelligence" systems - close to human in the breadth of their capabilities, and capable of tackling a wide range of tasks they weren't specifically designed to tackle. They're not superhuman across the board though - the capability profile is jagged, with sharply superhuman performance in some domains and deeply subhuman performance in others. And "AGI" is tied to "human level" - so LLMs get to sit in this weird niche of "subhuman AGI" instead.
- card_zero 1y agoYou must excuse me, it's well past my bedtime and I only entered into this to-and-fro by accident. But LLMs are very bad in some domains compared to humans, you say? Naturally I wonder which domains you have in mind. Three things humans have that look to me like they matter to the question of what intelligence is, without wanting to chance my arm on formulating an actual definition, are ideas, creativity, and what I think of as the basic moral drive, which might also be called motivation or spontaneity or "the will" (rather 1930s that one) or curiosity. But those might all be one thing. This basic drive, the notion of what to do next, makes you create ideas - maybe. Here I'm inclined to repeat "fuck knows". If you won't be drawn on a binary distinction, that seems to mean that everything is slightly intelligent, and the difference in quality of the intelligence of humans is a detail. But details interest me, you see.