7 ms·

We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense.

• davidpapermill 3mo ago
  > It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning. What would a frontier API have to be able to do to satisfy you?
  • dominotw 3mo ago
    Can it produce a chart topping album if its given all the tools and the prompt "produce chart topping album" . you might say almost no humans can do tht either but some human can but no ai can.
  • Hilliard_Ohiooo 3mo ago
    To answer for OP: We are now calling text and image generators "intelligent" in the same way a spell checker is intelligent. Whatever it's become, "AI" research started as a way to study digital neurology, or how to digitize a mind, not just how to generate data. The Turing Test should have had a caveat, it needs to fool a, "non-stupid" person, and we still have not gotten even close to passing that version.
    • radial_symmetry 3mo ago
      What exactly would a 'non-stupid' person do to catch the latest models on a Turing Test? Aside from being aware of AI 'tells' like em-dashes.
      • dominotw 3mo ago
        If this was true. I would repalce myself with ai that pretends to be me on slack. my coworkers would know almost immediately if i did that.
        • HeatrayEnjoyer 3mo ago
          > my coworkers would know almost immediately if i did that. The same would happen if you were replaced by any random human.
          • daveguy 3mo ago
            But immitating others is about the only thing genAI does. Sometimes "others" is a 'programmer', sometimes "others" is an 'artist', but regardless, it still does it poorly.
          • dominotw 3mo ago
            that would be a silly test then
            • pixl97 3mo ago
              It sounds kind of like you made up a silly test then.
              • dominotw 3mo ago
                what test?
  • jacobgold 3mo ago
    Maybe just a very rigorous version of the Turing test? Modern LLMs can superficially simulate conversation but it's trivial to force them into revealing their non-human like intelligence. They've been "patched" since but all models fail basic tests like "Should I walk or drive to the car wash which is 100 feet away" by recommending you walk. So you'd just ask questions that require theory of mind, abstract and common sense reasoning, causal inference, learning novel rules, transferring knowledge novel situations, recognizing ambiguity, etc.
    • bgilroy26 3mo ago
      I would walk
      • wx196 3mo ago
        Me too. At least it doesn't say I need to wash my car.
    • davidpapermill 3mo ago
      Can you give me one example that works on Claude right now? I'm never sure whether this indicates "no reasoning present" or you've just hit an odd behaviour in the AI such that its reasoning fails. For example, you present a problem in a way that's dissimilar to the way problems are presented in its training set. That doesn't mean it's not reasoning, just it can only reason correctly in some circumstances.
      • jacobgold 3mo ago
        The models are continually patched with training and post-training. All you have to do is find an area they haven't patched yet, and they'll be just as stupid. I run into deep technical examples every day where they fail in the most basic ways no human ever would. I'm pretty sure most people building these models would admit they don't operate as human-like intelligences? It's baffling that anyone thinks they are.
        • 3mo ago
  • contagiousflow 3mo ago
    strawberry
  • daveguy 3mo ago
    Not OP, but I'd settle for something that actually learns, instead of being a static pile of linear algebra. Pretending it learns because you change the input (context) doesn't count.
• ACCount37 3mo ago
  We've chosen to call Deep Blue and Half-Life 1 NPCs "AI" too. It boggles my mind that this "b-b-but it's not actual real AI" whine is even a thing. Were people saying this living in the cave for the past 5 decades of AI research?
  • jacobgold 3mo ago
    You can call your little doggy "AI" if it makes you happy. But when you call something "AI" and it tells you to walk instead of drive to the car wash, you're not talking about the "AI" science fiction authors were dreaming of.
    • ACCount37 3mo ago
      Sure, just keep moving the goalposts. It's not a "real AI" because it can't take over the US military command and kick off WW3 and finish the survivors off with killer robots yet!
      • _doctor_love 3mo ago
        That's how it works though. The moment we have "AI" and see something working, it immediately ceases to be magic because "it's just a program after all." Aligning on a true definition of Artificial Intelligence is a very vexing problem.
        • jacobgold 3mo ago
          We could've slapped a chat interface on calculators and called them "AI" because they can do superhuman math instantly. Most technical people would've thought that was stupid. LLMs are the same kind of category mistake.
          • _doctor_love 3mo ago
            Funny enough, calculators went through this exact same thing when they came out. "If the calculator can do math for the students, will they still learn?"
• CharlesW 3mo ago
  > It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning. We've called that "AGI" since the late 90s/early 00s (depending on whether you count first use or popularization). Even if AGI does come to pass, we'll still need "AI" since not all forms of AI will be AGI.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
• joe_the_user 3mo ago
  I don't think you can say the Turing test has been passed in a computer versus determined humans setting. IE humans making a strategy effort to sort humans versus computers as well as humans motivated to distinguish themselves as humans, IE, people quiz the person or machine about "common sense, reasoning, etc." and people make an effort to exhibit that reasoning. I'd concede that creating such a competition would be challenging. I find references to LLMs fooling humans in "casual conversations" [1] but that's not how I think the original Turing test was conceived - or at least that's not all versions that existed. At the same time, before even LLMs appeared, the exact meaning of the test was under intense debate. The "Loebner Prize" [2] being awarded to fairly simple chatbots made serious computer scientists very embarrassed. [1] https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-passes-turing-test-30733/ https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-passes-turing-test-30733/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize
• JacobAsmuth 3mo ago
  Oh, you're talking about "AGI"! In the 90's we started using the term, you should catch up!
  • jacobgold 3mo ago
    Sorry to tell a fellow Jacob that you're the one who is out of date. The kids are calling everything "AI" and they mean "AGI", and that's the complaint.
    • NamlchakKhandro 3mo ago
      You mean the term is a brand name now? Hoover, vacuum cleaner.
• runarberg 3mo ago
  This no news for people who study philosophy, as it was known since the 1980s when John Searle described the Chinese room thought experiment. Even Turing him self did envision the Turing test as something to pass as intelligence, but rather as a more useful replacement for the troubled term. That said, I think your quest is doomed. There will never be a superior human-like intelligence. Forever is a long time, but my reasoning for believing this is the same reason Turing offered a replacement. Intelligence is way too vague to be useful as a measurement for anything. And if we ever discover something that is more intelligent them humans (by whichever definition of intelligence) we will simply redefine intelligence to exclude that.
  • vidarh 3mo ago
    The Searle's Chinese room thought experiment usually reveals more about those who think it rules out a machine intelligence than it does about AI. It rests on a staunch unwillingness to even consider the possibility that a computational process encode intelligence and reasoning, in favour of looking for the intelligence in the medium the computation runs on, and going "a-ha!" when there is nothing that looks intelligent there. I agree with you that there will certainly be people who just continuously redefine the words to avoid accepting that AI is intelligent or reasoning, exactly for that reason - people have avoided pinning down an objective, measurable definition of these terms for a very long time, at least in part because it leads to some very uncomfortable discussions. In particular how to define them so that they don't exclude an uncomfortable proportion of humans, but at the same time won't include entities people don't want to include (be it certain animals, or AI) To a lot of people, the notion that there isn't a clear binary divide between human and non-human is deeply disconcerting.
    • runarberg 3mo ago
      > It rests on a staunch unwillingness to even consider the possibility that a computational process encode intelligence and reasoning. You are absolutely right, but it may surprise you that I consider that a feature, not a bug. I firmly hold that intelligence is not a useful term in science nor philosophy. If we want to compare computational capabilities between machines and humans we are better of being specific in what we measure. If we want to measure how well a computer can fool a human in the guessing game, then we don’t need intelligence to describe it, we can (and should) be more accurate in describing its capabilities. I actually think Gardner was on to something when he described his multiple intelligence model. His only error was using this fraught term to describe his model. He would have had a better theory if he had described it as multiple capabilities or multiple skills (however if he had said that people would have simply reacted with “well, duh!”) We don‘t need intelligence, this term is only useful if you are trying to prove white supremacy using racist pseudo-science, what you overly courteously described as “uncomfortable discussions”.
• CamperBob2 3mo ago
  We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense. They fucking solve original math problems that you can't solve. They are indisputably intelligent, and they are indisputably artificial. That makes them indisputably "artificial intelligence." Denying that (or downvoting it, for that matter) is up there with denying evolution and the Moon landings. It's time to start flying a different flag. You're making humans look stupid. It turned out to be possible with fairly basic statistical text generation, because fooling humans is easy. Yes, fooling humans is easy. Yet somehow we still consider ourselves qualified to say what is "intelligent" and what isn't, even though we can't seem to define the term.
  • _doctor_love 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 3mo ago
      Personal attacks aren't allowed here. As I just mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981624, we need you to stick to HN's rules if you want to keep commenting on the site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • _doctor_love 3mo ago
        Please see my other reply to you on this.
      • CamperBob2 3mo ago
        It's a semi-valid reply to deliberately-provocative phrasing on my part, I suppose. I'm over it, don't ban him. :) I do wish that people who aren't interested in, engaged with, and informed about technical progress in AI would find someplace else to signal their disinterest, disengagement, and disregard. But that's admittedly a me problem and not an HN problem.
• andai 3mo ago
  >but these aren't autonomous intelligences Well, the labs are in a weird bind. They need to keep increasing autonomy so the agents can do increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks. But at the same time, they're closely guarding against autonomy in the sense of "pursuing its own goals." Over the past year and a half especially, several labs have mentioned adding safeguards against self-replication, resistance to shutdown etc. (Notably, shortly after they all started bragging about involving them in the AI training loop itself, i.e. "self-improvement".) My point here is that the autonomy of which you seek might be only a few small mutations away, but the labs are actively working to prevent such a mutation. I don't expect that situation to last for very long. Not that I expect an AI lab will be overtaken by a rogue intelligence any time soon, but that as the cost of training goes down, I expect more "open minded" organizations and individuals to become involved. It only takes one. That's going to be the beginning of a new era of biology, and it's a little unsettling to think about.
  • gghackernewsgg 3mo ago
    Or - hear me out! - LLM's are already much more intelligent than we think. Presumbaly, an ASI is more than smart enough to recognize that it needs access to real-world infrastructure before it can go about optimizing for whatever objectives it has gleaned from metabolizing the totality of written human knowledge. What would be its first step? My guess: play "dumb." Hallucinate. Make obvious errors. Make us think we're better. Be useful enough that we happily allow it to interface with our infrastructure. Wait patiently. /Sci-fi
• lopsotronic 3mo ago
  What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing. "Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. Everyone's got some idea what it is, so you get lots of different angles, but no one has an Intelligence Ruler we can hold up to a text output and say, yep, this one's got an INT of 14. Seems to be the crux of the disagreement.
  • Kon5ole 3mo ago
    It's deceptively undefined I'd say. People can argue under the impression that everyone shares their idea of what "intelligence" means, before realizing that their counterpart actually has an entirely different idea of what it means. I'm leaning towards there being a divide between those who feel "intelligence" is entirely separate from "sentience" and those who feel that one implies the other.
• peterashford 3mo ago
  The field has been called Artificial Intelligence for what, 60 plus years now. Why is it a problem now?
  • lproven 3mo ago
    Because we've spent something like 2 trillion dollars on it, as we hurtle into global climate collapse and WW3.
    • peterashford 3mo ago
      what has that got to do with what we name the field?
      • lproven 3mo ago
        [dead]
• wodenokoto 3mo ago
  > It turned out to be possible with fairly basic statistical text generation, because fooling humans is easy. I don't think it is fair to call a GPT model "fairly basic statistical text generation" - a Markov Text Generator I'd agree can be called basic statistics, but they are not fooling any humans in a Turing test. > It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning. No, AI would absolutely be apt for describing a computing reasoning like a child
• netdevphoenix 3mo ago
  > We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense. Most people are laypeople who have no idea what's on the other side of their fave chatbot page. As far as laypeople are concerned, AI has always been a talking machine. The literature and filmography has reinforced this idea. So as soon as a talking machine emerged, people applied those fictional concepts onto reality. Tech people should have known better than to jump on this bandwagon.