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> there’s no “intelligence” there BUT There is clearly intelligence there. We have no way to recognise intelligence other than the appearance of intelligence a

> there’s no “intelligence” there BUT There is clearly intelligence there. We have no way to recognise intelligence other than the appearance of intelligence and this very clearly displays that. It's also quite clearly different to human intelligence in some notable ways, but not in any that preclude describing it as intelligent. At least for normal non-pedantic definitions of the word.

majormajor 3mo ago
Everyone uses "intelligence" to mean something slightly different, so for this to be a useful claim to make or refute we need to come up with new, intentionally-pedantic, terms (or new domain-specific definitions for vague existing ones).
- contextfree 3mo ago
  Yes, trying to communicate (or watching others try to communicate) about these topics is incredibly frustrating because it's pretty much impossible to make any progress without interrogating people's different definitions, but nobody wants to do that because it would mean being pedantic, splitting hairs, etc.
- kadoban 3mo ago
  It's not like this is a new problem. Turing had a definition most of a century ago, he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last. I don't think we need new terms necessarily, and I doubt we're all going to agree on a definition tomorrow.
- Scarblac 3mo ago
  At any rate, if the AI's side in this conversation were a human, that would be an extremely intelligent human indeed. But there's no way the thinking times would have been that short, of course.
nozzlegear 3mo ago
That's not clear at all. What's clear is that this is a very smart man who knows how to use this tool well.
- squidbeak 3mo ago
  I'd say an entity capable of instructing one of the leading mathematicians of his era is pretty clearly intelligent by any reasonable measure - however it might be arriving at its output.
  - nozzlegear 3mo ago
    I think we have wildly different conclusions about what happened here. You see the machine as instructing Terrence Tao, as if it were Plato teaching Socrates about the theory of forms; I see Terrence Tao using the machine to teach himself, like an intelligent student uses a book. In this case, it's just a book that fools us into believing it can think and reason like we do, because it generates language in much the same way we do when we think and reason.
    - 2snakes 3mo ago
      Yeah. Artificial knowledge not artificial intelligence.
    - slidehero 3mo ago
      > In this case, it's just a book that fools us into believing it can think and reason like we do that's some Harry Potter kind of "writes itself" book. at this point, for me, any comment about LLMs that begins with "it's just ..." is hard to take seriously. Terrence is impressed. Good enough for me.
      - nozzlegear 3mo ago
        > that's some Harry Potter kind of "writes itself" book. I'm sure people thought calculators and, indeed, computers themselves were very Harry Potter as well when they first came out. But in the fullness of time the magic and mystique has drained away, and we're left with the understanding that they're just tools. > at this point, for me, any comment about LLMs that begins with "it's just ..." is hard to take seriously. Similarly I have a hard time taking seriously the people who make breathless claims of intelligence where there's only a text calculator with weights applied. It's like watching the devout cry "miracle!" at every strangely shaped piece of toast. Terrence is impressed, but he's not a believer.
Diogenesian 3mo ago
[flagged]
- anthonypasq 3mo ago
  > If AI researchers cared about scientific thinking, they would be intensely focused on the brains of bees. Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described. The AI industrialists stopped caring 6 years ago once they realized LLMs seem to have been the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level. There are plenty of pioneering scientists who are either returning to actual AI research (Yann Lecun, Ilya, etc), and plenty who never left (Richard Sutton) who are doing exactly what you are talking about.
  - Diogenesian 3mo ago
    > Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described. That is not true. Alan Turing did not view things that way, his test would say that a dog has zero intelligence. Neither did any of the MIT Lispers. And neither do Lecun or Sutskever or Sutton! They are all focused on human intelligence. None of them are even slightly concerned about an AI which is intelligent before it learns any language. > the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM.
    - anthonypasq 3mo ago
      > And neither do Lecun or Sutskever or Sutton! They are all focused on human intelligence. None of them are even slightly concerned about an AI which is intelligent before it learns any language. ??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvibIstOn_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvibIstOn_E his arguemtn here is clearly built around using some sort of sensory data to build a model of the world like humans (animals) do. also you clearly decline to mention Lecun who has made this point ad-infinitum > This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM. i personally find it very strange that non-deep learning AI approaches which essentially boiled down to a giant bundle of if statements, or some very simple statistical modeling were called AI in the first place.
superloika 3mo ago
There is no intelligence. If anything, this just shows that natural language and mathematics are both fields which are structured in a logically computable way. And if you have a machine that can compute symbolic logic, you can process both natural language and mathematics. A second corollary is that rational consciousness and thought is less likely to be contained in language than previously thought, because if language is so simple that a machine can process it, it can't contain consciousness.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  If natural language was structured in a logically computable way, we'd have had interesting chatbots by the late 80s, basically as soon as a dictionary fit in local RAM, and for the same reason we got compilers. Da hole raisin y nat-lang be v. hard is dat i kan rite lik dis an it be cool 4 native engrish speekrs 2 unerstand. LLMs are of course fine with this sentence in exactly the way that Zork's engine couldn't be.
  - superloika 3mo ago
    The underlying structure of language, which is grammar, is obviously logical. That the symbols used to represent this grammar can be sometimes fuzzy or ambiguous, is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.
    - ben_w 3mo ago
      It's not "obviously logical", it's a pattern which we mimic to avoid mockery. example For, semi-randomise I word order can this like, Yoda worse than, and be understood. > is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure. We had to invent Transformers to be able to do that with reliability anything close to being worth caring about. Transformers have to learn from examples, not be pre-programmed.
    - EnergyAmy 3mo ago
      The idea that grammar is all it takes to process natural language is absolute beans.
thechao 3mo ago
I'm no intelligence researcher or philosopher; but, I think LLMs make us confront the (IMO, now clear) distinction between cleverness (intuition), reasoning (rational argument), and consciousness. I suspect that we think of "intelligence" as either of the first two welded to the latter. In that vein, I'd say that consciousness may be just another emotion: happiness, sadness, egoness.
- JCattheATM 3mo ago
  > consciousness may be just another emotion: happiness, sadness, egoness. It's clearly much more than that.

majormajor 3mo ago

Everyone uses "intelligence" to mean something slightly different, so for this to be a useful claim to make or refute we need to come up with new, intentionally-pedantic, terms (or new domain-specific definitions for vague existing ones).

contextfree 3mo ago
Yes, trying to communicate (or watching others try to communicate) about these topics is incredibly frustrating because it's pretty much impossible to make any progress without interrogating people's different definitions, but nobody wants to do that because it would mean being pedantic, splitting hairs, etc.
kadoban 3mo ago
It's not like this is a new problem. Turing had a definition most of a century ago, he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last. I don't think we need new terms necessarily, and I doubt we're all going to agree on a definition tomorrow.
Scarblac 3mo ago
At any rate, if the AI's side in this conversation were a human, that would be an extremely intelligent human indeed. But there's no way the thinking times would have been that short, of course.

nozzlegear 3mo ago

That's not clear at all. What's clear is that this is a very smart man who knows how to use this tool well.

squidbeak 3mo ago
I'd say an entity capable of instructing one of the leading mathematicians of his era is pretty clearly intelligent by any reasonable measure - however it might be arriving at its output.
- nozzlegear 3mo ago
  I think we have wildly different conclusions about what happened here. You see the machine as instructing Terrence Tao, as if it were Plato teaching Socrates about the theory of forms; I see Terrence Tao using the machine to teach himself, like an intelligent student uses a book. In this case, it's just a book that fools us into believing it can think and reason like we do, because it generates language in much the same way we do when we think and reason.
  - 2snakes 3mo ago
    Yeah. Artificial knowledge not artificial intelligence.
  - slidehero 3mo ago
    > In this case, it's just a book that fools us into believing it can think and reason like we do that's some Harry Potter kind of "writes itself" book. at this point, for me, any comment about LLMs that begins with "it's just ..." is hard to take seriously. Terrence is impressed. Good enough for me.
    - nozzlegear 3mo ago
      > that's some Harry Potter kind of "writes itself" book. I'm sure people thought calculators and, indeed, computers themselves were very Harry Potter as well when they first came out. But in the fullness of time the magic and mystique has drained away, and we're left with the understanding that they're just tools. > at this point, for me, any comment about LLMs that begins with "it's just ..." is hard to take seriously. Similarly I have a hard time taking seriously the people who make breathless claims of intelligence where there's only a text calculator with weights applied. It's like watching the devout cry "miracle!" at every strangely shaped piece of toast. Terrence is impressed, but he's not a believer.

Diogenesian 3mo ago

[flagged]

anthonypasq 3mo ago
> If AI researchers cared about scientific thinking, they would be intensely focused on the brains of bees. Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described. The AI industrialists stopped caring 6 years ago once they realized LLMs seem to have been the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level. There are plenty of pioneering scientists who are either returning to actual AI research (Yann Lecun, Ilya, etc), and plenty who never left (Richard Sutton) who are doing exactly what you are talking about.
- Diogenesian 3mo ago
  > Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described. That is not true. Alan Turing did not view things that way, his test would say that a dog has zero intelligence. Neither did any of the MIT Lispers. And neither do Lecun or Sutskever or Sutton! They are all focused on human intelligence. None of them are even slightly concerned about an AI which is intelligent before it learns any language. > the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM.
  - anthonypasq 3mo ago
    > And neither do Lecun or Sutskever or Sutton! They are all focused on human intelligence. None of them are even slightly concerned about an AI which is intelligent before it learns any language. ??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvibIstOn_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvibIstOn_E his arguemtn here is clearly built around using some sort of sensory data to build a model of the world like humans (animals) do. also you clearly decline to mention Lecun who has made this point ad-infinitum > This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM. i personally find it very strange that non-deep learning AI approaches which essentially boiled down to a giant bundle of if statements, or some very simple statistical modeling were called AI in the first place.

superloika 3mo ago

There is no intelligence. If anything, this just shows that natural language and mathematics are both fields which are structured in a logically computable way. And if you have a machine that can compute symbolic logic, you can process both natural language and mathematics. A second corollary is that rational consciousness and thought is less likely to be contained in language than previously thought, because if language is so simple that a machine can process it, it can't contain consciousness.

ben_w 3mo ago
If natural language was structured in a logically computable way, we'd have had interesting chatbots by the late 80s, basically as soon as a dictionary fit in local RAM, and for the same reason we got compilers. Da hole raisin y nat-lang be v. hard is dat i kan rite lik dis an it be cool 4 native engrish speekrs 2 unerstand. LLMs are of course fine with this sentence in exactly the way that Zork's engine couldn't be.
- superloika 3mo ago
  The underlying structure of language, which is grammar, is obviously logical. That the symbols used to represent this grammar can be sometimes fuzzy or ambiguous, is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    It's not "obviously logical", it's a pattern which we mimic to avoid mockery. example For, semi-randomise I word order can this like, Yoda worse than, and be understood. > is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure. We had to invent Transformers to be able to do that with reliability anything close to being worth caring about. Transformers have to learn from examples, not be pre-programmed.
  - EnergyAmy 3mo ago
    The idea that grammar is all it takes to process natural language is absolute beans.

thechao 3mo ago

I'm no intelligence researcher or philosopher; but, I think LLMs make us confront the (IMO, now clear) distinction between cleverness (intuition), reasoning (rational argument), and consciousness. I suspect that we think of "intelligence" as either of the first two welded to the latter. In that vein, I'd say that consciousness may be just another emotion: happiness, sadness, egoness.

JCattheATM 3mo ago
> consciousness may be just another emotion: happiness, sadness, egoness. It's clearly much more than that.