6 ms·

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rat

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

figers 1mo ago
watch this and see if you think it has intelligence by the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8
- bayindirh 1mo ago
  I also like this: https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ It shows internals of an LLM nicely, simplified manner.
- pyridines 1mo ago
  This looks interesting, but would you mind saying a sentence or two about why before I commit to an hour-long video? It looks like it shows how they work internally, which is sort of a non sequitur. Brains also work mechanistically. I'm claiming that any system which is able to do what AIs do must necessarily have some sort of intelligence.
  - figers 1mo ago
    fair reply to an hour video, Scott is just so good to hear his talk is better than I can explain it... go to 24 minutes and 07 seconds. it's statistically determining what the next word should be based on all the text it's been trained on. It's not intelligence and he shows what probability it puts on each word that it chooses, but also shows a lot of the other words it was thinking of using. In a later part he shows how it uses words that are not the highest probability (and you question why did it go this route, it's not more correct), but the user never sees this, they see what they think is the correct answer always... he also shows how context you feed it has a lot to do with what it returns... to the point he can get it to return the capital of France is Marseille, just by typing Marseille a bunch of times before the question. Human intelligence doesn't get confused like that. And it's not a "hallucination", it's just probability of the next token prediction based on the information it's been trained on and fed, it's not intelligence.
    - rnd33 1mo ago
      Isn't this a case of missing the trees for the forest though? The human brain is not an LLM, and an LLM is not intelligent in the same way as a human brain. However, an LLM is a prediction machine, prediction IS at the very least one (or the most fundamental) element of intelligence. The brain most surely contains at least some kind of simulacrum of a prediction machine. How that prediction machine is used or wrapped is another matter. If I said to you: "Blue blue blue, the color of my car is red", would you have absolute confidence in your prediction that my car is red? Or would the way I phrased that sentence make you slightly uncertain, and wonder if there's some miscommunication going on here?
      - figers 1mo ago
        LLMs are awesome awesome tech! A lot of people seem to think it's human level intelligence.
    - mitthrowaway2 1mo ago
      > Human intelligence doesn't get confused like that. We do; this is the premise of many children's riddle-games, like the one that goes: "What is white and rhymes with silk? > Milk. What is cheese made from? > Milk. > What do cows drink?" At which point the riddle-guesser is very likely to answer "milk" even though the correct answer is "water".
      - recursive 1mo ago
        I take issue with your "correct" answer. Q: Why do cows produce milk? A: Because calves (baby cows) drink it.
        mitthrowaway2 1mo ago
        Yep, if the riddle asked "what do calves drink", then "milk" would definitely have been the correct answer.
        1mo ago
- ragequittah 1mo ago
  I wonder if you went back before we had any idea how the brain worked and talked to the smartest people about how neurons work (without giving away that it's a human brain) then asked them all "would such a system be intelligent?" how many would say yes. The main problem I have with people stating it's not intelligent or conscious is I don't think we even have a good definition of either word that satisfies everyone. Philosophers have been trying (and failing) to elegantly define these things forever and everyone out here proclaiming they've got the definitive answer and this specific thing they're seeing doesn't fit under it.
  - sophrosyne42 1mo ago
    The definition issue cuts both ways. It is just as much an issue for those insisting that LLMs are intelligent/conscious in some way.
    - ragequittah 1mo ago
      Agreed. All I can say is the conversations I have with AI and the things it's able to do for me are more useful than most any human I've come across. Whether that's 'intelligence' or not is a moot point to me. Consciousness is an interesting debate only because, similar to the natural world, if we declare something like "fish aren't conscious / don't feel pain" that then creates a real problem for the fish if we're wrong.
bayindirh 1mo ago
It's just filled to the brim with relations between things. It's good at searching a very large meaning space and create correlations. What it does is to cover great distances and find related things in that large space which needs a long time and large corpus of knowledge to find the connection. This is not intelligence. It's just a good correlation engine with a very big albeit lossy database of things.
- pyridines 1mo ago
  The very fact that it is able to search within a meaning-space demonstrates that it understands semantics, to some extent. Philosophically, that is profound, for something that is just one big matrix multiplication. Drawing connections between things in meaning-space is surely a facet of intelligence.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bayindirh 1mo ago
    It’s not intelligence if you are the one who gives the correlations to the model in the pre-training. It’s Word2Vec, applied. Model doesn’t learn anything. You embed these correlations and build it from there. It just searches the space. As my AI professor said in the first lecture: “All AI is advanced search”.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - pyridines 1mo ago
      Okay, I guess you're right that its ability to do this is just correlational, which doesn't imply it has any understanding. However, you have to conclude that some tasks which we used to believe required intelligence don't actually require any, which is disconcerting.
      - 1mo ago
ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
LLMs are pattern prediction systems with a large training data set. It is not surprising that they can predict patterns, particularly for a well structured field like mathematics that is also amenable to automated proof checking to help steer it.
- red75prime 1mo ago
  "Pattern prediction" is a very broad stroke. What's something AI can never do that would astonish you if it did?
  - xigoi 1mo ago
    Perform the same tasks as a human can, given only the amount of training data and energy that a typical human has access to.
    - red75prime 1mo ago
      I guess it will take quite a while before we reverse engineer the human brain to find all the optimizations and shortcuts that evolution has used to make the human brain reach intellectual maturity in just about 20 years.
  - ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
    "AI" is a vague term that encompasses both traditional GOFAI, LLMs, and future tech so your question is meaningless. Non-human intelligence is possible, if that's what you're actually asking. What part of my statement do you take issue with: that LLMs are pattern predictors (that's literally what the algorithm that runs it does) or that mathematics is rules-based and checkable and therefore amenable to automated pattern prediction?
    - red75prime 1mo ago
      My issue is that I can't predict what you'll find surprising, if an LLM (with a harness) would be able to do it. If you are able to check that the results of an LLM are satisfactory, it means that the results are checkable. Then, in retrospect, the process of LLM coming up with those results is rule-based, because an LLM is a large set of data manipulation rules. In short, which concrete thing that an LLM does would surprise you?
bluetomcat 1mo ago
It has no semantic depth. The sentences and the paragraphs are a statistically viable derivation of existing human text, but once you try to grasp the whole thing with its temporal and spatial dimensions, you are left with a blurry mess that rots your brain. It's a polished, inoffensive and shallow interpretation as written by an opinionated reputation-seeking user of Quora, circa 2019. Assertive, bold, without typos, clean-cut and bulleted, but without an interesting semantic core.
- josh-sematic 1mo ago
  Yeah, I hated all those Quora users that would just spew out semantically meaningless slop like increasing an important bound for the Riemann hypothesis. https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/564f962e60643842f5fcb4a17c9dbc8f608f1c37.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/564f962e60643842f5fcb4a17c9dbc...
  - serbuvlad 1mo ago
    It's all so tiring. Everyone decides what to think on this issue, then finds out facts to support their idea. As it stands they are massively useful tools, but for generating usable products they require either A) a lot of expert steering or B) a well defined easily verifiable target and a large compute budget. Most people are using them in mode A with good effect, the progress on math has been done in mode B, which is very promising. Just a year and a half ago their maximal use was rephrase, summarize, and homework-level tasks. Five years from now? There be dragons. "But are they generally intelligent?" What a meaningless question!
    - ddj231 1mo ago
      Not meaningless because part of the discussion is the issue of anthropomorphizing this tech. When we use language like “intelligent” it carries hints of personhood. People begin sadly treating these things as persons. We can reap the benefits while clearly telling the consumer this is just a language algorithm.
      - 1mo ago
wongarsu 1mo ago
We couldn't agree on what intelligence means before ChatGPT happened. Now, agreement on the term seems even further away If performing well on an IQ test or performing at a high level on knowledge work is intelligence to you, these models are intelligent. If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't have it right now But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition
- tshaddox 1mo ago
  I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bats exhibit intelligence when they navigate long distances and hunt for food.
  - svachalek 1mo ago
    I agree, but it's clear most people need a definition of intelligence that (1) they qualify for and (2) nothing/no one they don't like qualifies for. And they'll keep redefining intelligence until they satisfy both criteria.
  - thfuran 1mo ago
    I'm not exactly that you mean by "new to the system", but it seems to me that that definition makes a calculator intelligent, which I can't agree with.
    - rcxdude 1mo ago
      Intelligence isn't a binary property. Is it really a problem to say that a calculator has some intelligence? That it's more intelligent than e.g. a rock?
duped 1mo ago
I don't think statistically driven prediction implies reasoning or intelligence.
- malfist 1mo ago
  Its a mirror to human intelligence. Regurgitating phrasing to match what someone who can reason put together, but it isn't any more intelligent than the reflection of you in the mirror is.
- stevenhuang 1mo ago
  First you need to prove that human cognitive function is also not fundamentally driven by statistical processes. It's possible that "statistically driven prediction" is all we are.
EA-3167 1mo ago
I suspect like most you don't appreciate how terrifying statistical relationships become when you have truly vast data sets to train on... and also that we as humans aren't as shockingly unique as we think (compared to other humans I mean).
prophesi 1mo ago
I'm guessing whether you believe it possesses intelligence or not depends on your answer to Searle's Chinese room thought experiment[0]. I'd also recommend checking out the Peter Watts' book, Blindsight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- staticman2 1mo ago
  This comment thread was started with discussions of AI doing a bad job at a task (communication). Doesn't the Chinese Room posit an AI good at the task of communication?
  - rcxdude 1mo ago
    The Chinese Room mainly just posits a room that passes the Turing Test, which LLMs do pretty well outside of outright adversarial situations.
    - codethief 1mo ago
      Do they? https://longbets.org/1/ https://longbets.org/1/ has yet to be settled. Either way, I doubt an LLM could fool anyone here who who knows how LLMs work into thinking it is human, at least not for an extended period of time (think about context length/compression, prompt injections, …).
      - idiotsecant 1mo ago
        You'll notice those goalposts are substantially stretched from the original test.
        codethief 1mo ago
        How so?
  - jay_kyburz 1mo ago
    AIs are better communicators that most of people I have worked with in my life. They are infinitely patient, don't mind going into more detail if I ask, not too bad at summary, have no ego and don't boast. They are also not too afraid of hurting my feelings, they will tell me my code sux if it does. I'd don't care if they fit a definition intelligent, they are good colleagues. They have strengths and weaknesses sure, but so do people.
mythrwy 1mo ago
While being very capable, AI is missing something required for true intelligence and I struggle to explain exactly what it is I see missing. It's not really "creativity" because much of that always was derivative in my opinion. And LLMs are (for some definition of the word) fairly creative as far as taking known elements and re-arranging them. I think what is missing is sort of a world model building capability. As humans we see phenomenon and classify them informally and model "what would it look like if this were the cause of that?" type scenarios. We see qualities in phenomena and realize this applies to other things even though the things may be completely different. We run informal "thought experiments" sort of. This is hard to duplicate because a lot (most?) of it occurs outside of systems of symbols like math and language with fixed rules in my opinion. Anyway yes, lots of human thinking is statistical and LLMs have that down pretty well but they are not "smart" I have concluded and it might be a very long time, if ever, until they are. That isn't to say they aren't very capable tools which they obviously are.
- buzzin__ 1mo ago
  So, right of the bat, you are warning us that you are going to apply the " no true Sscottman" fallacy, and that we should brace ourselves. Yes, models posses intelligence, but it is not a true one. Then you claim that models do not posses world-building capabilities. But this is simply not true. Even ignoring the whole subgenre of scientific papers on exactly that subject, it is not that hard to build some hypothetical scenarios, big or small, and then witness the ease with which models do navigate those worlds.
  - layla5alive 1mo ago
    Yes. And they are criticizing a model for not having a default mode network - as if that is some impossibility rather than just an artifact of the current iteration of the specific architectures we have built so far. Why do people paint with these broad brushes over relatively specific complaints? LLMs are likely for machine intelligence something like drosophila are to biological intelligence - relatively early on the high dimensional spectrum of possibility. Though it stikes me that in a different way they're little alike - drosophila are relatively small and efficient.
ddj231 1mo ago
By that logic you’d have to call other algorithms intelligent. With more basic algorithms we know that it’s clearly the human programmer and the interpreter of the outputs that are intelligent and not the algorithm itself. For some reason with AI that goes out the window. I believe it should not.

figers 1mo ago

watch this and see if you think it has intelligence by the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8

bayindirh 1mo ago
I also like this: https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/ It shows internals of an LLM nicely, simplified manner.
pyridines 1mo ago
This looks interesting, but would you mind saying a sentence or two about why before I commit to an hour-long video? It looks like it shows how they work internally, which is sort of a non sequitur. Brains also work mechanistically. I'm claiming that any system which is able to do what AIs do must necessarily have some sort of intelligence.
- figers 1mo ago
  fair reply to an hour video, Scott is just so good to hear his talk is better than I can explain it... go to 24 minutes and 07 seconds. it's statistically determining what the next word should be based on all the text it's been trained on. It's not intelligence and he shows what probability it puts on each word that it chooses, but also shows a lot of the other words it was thinking of using. In a later part he shows how it uses words that are not the highest probability (and you question why did it go this route, it's not more correct), but the user never sees this, they see what they think is the correct answer always... he also shows how context you feed it has a lot to do with what it returns... to the point he can get it to return the capital of France is Marseille, just by typing Marseille a bunch of times before the question. Human intelligence doesn't get confused like that. And it's not a "hallucination", it's just probability of the next token prediction based on the information it's been trained on and fed, it's not intelligence.
  - rnd33 1mo ago
    Isn't this a case of missing the trees for the forest though? The human brain is not an LLM, and an LLM is not intelligent in the same way as a human brain. However, an LLM is a prediction machine, prediction IS at the very least one (or the most fundamental) element of intelligence. The brain most surely contains at least some kind of simulacrum of a prediction machine. How that prediction machine is used or wrapped is another matter. If I said to you: "Blue blue blue, the color of my car is red", would you have absolute confidence in your prediction that my car is red? Or would the way I phrased that sentence make you slightly uncertain, and wonder if there's some miscommunication going on here?
    - figers 1mo ago
      LLMs are awesome awesome tech! A lot of people seem to think it's human level intelligence.
  - mitthrowaway2 1mo ago
    > Human intelligence doesn't get confused like that. We do; this is the premise of many children's riddle-games, like the one that goes: "What is white and rhymes with silk? > Milk. What is cheese made from? > Milk. > What do cows drink?" At which point the riddle-guesser is very likely to answer "milk" even though the correct answer is "water".
    - recursive 1mo ago
      I take issue with your "correct" answer. Q: Why do cows produce milk? A: Because calves (baby cows) drink it.
      - mitthrowaway2 1mo ago
        Yep, if the riddle asked "what do calves drink", then "milk" would definitely have been the correct answer.
        1mo ago
ragequittah 1mo ago
I wonder if you went back before we had any idea how the brain worked and talked to the smartest people about how neurons work (without giving away that it's a human brain) then asked them all "would such a system be intelligent?" how many would say yes. The main problem I have with people stating it's not intelligent or conscious is I don't think we even have a good definition of either word that satisfies everyone. Philosophers have been trying (and failing) to elegantly define these things forever and everyone out here proclaiming they've got the definitive answer and this specific thing they're seeing doesn't fit under it.
- sophrosyne42 1mo ago
  The definition issue cuts both ways. It is just as much an issue for those insisting that LLMs are intelligent/conscious in some way.
  - ragequittah 1mo ago
    Agreed. All I can say is the conversations I have with AI and the things it's able to do for me are more useful than most any human I've come across. Whether that's 'intelligence' or not is a moot point to me. Consciousness is an interesting debate only because, similar to the natural world, if we declare something like "fish aren't conscious / don't feel pain" that then creates a real problem for the fish if we're wrong.

bayindirh 1mo ago

It's just filled to the brim with relations between things. It's good at searching a very large meaning space and create correlations. What it does is to cover great distances and find related things in that large space which needs a long time and large corpus of knowledge to find the connection. This is not intelligence. It's just a good correlation engine with a very big albeit lossy database of things.

pyridines 1mo ago
The very fact that it is able to search within a meaning-space demonstrates that it understands semantics, to some extent. Philosophically, that is profound, for something that is just one big matrix multiplication. Drawing connections between things in meaning-space is surely a facet of intelligence.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- bayindirh 1mo ago
  It’s not intelligence if you are the one who gives the correlations to the model in the pre-training. It’s Word2Vec, applied. Model doesn’t learn anything. You embed these correlations and build it from there. It just searches the space. As my AI professor said in the first lecture: “All AI is advanced search”.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - pyridines 1mo ago
    Okay, I guess you're right that its ability to do this is just correlational, which doesn't imply it has any understanding. However, you have to conclude that some tasks which we used to believe required intelligence don't actually require any, which is disconcerting.
    - 1mo ago

ThrowawayR2 1mo ago

LLMs are pattern prediction systems with a large training data set. It is not surprising that they can predict patterns, particularly for a well structured field like mathematics that is also amenable to automated proof checking to help steer it.

red75prime 1mo ago
"Pattern prediction" is a very broad stroke. What's something AI can never do that would astonish you if it did?
- xigoi 1mo ago
  Perform the same tasks as a human can, given only the amount of training data and energy that a typical human has access to.
  - red75prime 1mo ago
    I guess it will take quite a while before we reverse engineer the human brain to find all the optimizations and shortcuts that evolution has used to make the human brain reach intellectual maturity in just about 20 years.
- ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
  "AI" is a vague term that encompasses both traditional GOFAI, LLMs, and future tech so your question is meaningless. Non-human intelligence is possible, if that's what you're actually asking. What part of my statement do you take issue with: that LLMs are pattern predictors (that's literally what the algorithm that runs it does) or that mathematics is rules-based and checkable and therefore amenable to automated pattern prediction?
  - red75prime 1mo ago
    My issue is that I can't predict what you'll find surprising, if an LLM (with a harness) would be able to do it. If you are able to check that the results of an LLM are satisfactory, it means that the results are checkable. Then, in retrospect, the process of LLM coming up with those results is rule-based, because an LLM is a large set of data manipulation rules. In short, which concrete thing that an LLM does would surprise you?

bluetomcat 1mo ago

It has no semantic depth. The sentences and the paragraphs are a statistically viable derivation of existing human text, but once you try to grasp the whole thing with its temporal and spatial dimensions, you are left with a blurry mess that rots your brain. It's a polished, inoffensive and shallow interpretation as written by an opinionated reputation-seeking user of Quora, circa 2019. Assertive, bold, without typos, clean-cut and bulleted, but without an interesting semantic core.

josh-sematic 1mo ago
Yeah, I hated all those Quora users that would just spew out semantically meaningless slop like increasing an important bound for the Riemann hypothesis. https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/564f962e60643842f5fcb4a17c9dbc8f608f1c37.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/564f962e60643842f5fcb4a17c9dbc...
- serbuvlad 1mo ago
  It's all so tiring. Everyone decides what to think on this issue, then finds out facts to support their idea. As it stands they are massively useful tools, but for generating usable products they require either A) a lot of expert steering or B) a well defined easily verifiable target and a large compute budget. Most people are using them in mode A with good effect, the progress on math has been done in mode B, which is very promising. Just a year and a half ago their maximal use was rephrase, summarize, and homework-level tasks. Five years from now? There be dragons. "But are they generally intelligent?" What a meaningless question!
  - ddj231 1mo ago
    Not meaningless because part of the discussion is the issue of anthropomorphizing this tech. When we use language like “intelligent” it carries hints of personhood. People begin sadly treating these things as persons. We can reap the benefits while clearly telling the consumer this is just a language algorithm.
    - 1mo ago

wongarsu 1mo ago

We couldn't agree on what intelligence means before ChatGPT happened. Now, agreement on the term seems even further away If performing well on an IQ test or performing at a high level on knowledge work is intelligence to you, these models are intelligent. If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't have it right now But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition

tshaddox 1mo ago
I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bats exhibit intelligence when they navigate long distances and hunt for food.
- svachalek 1mo ago
  I agree, but it's clear most people need a definition of intelligence that (1) they qualify for and (2) nothing/no one they don't like qualifies for. And they'll keep redefining intelligence until they satisfy both criteria.
- thfuran 1mo ago
  I'm not exactly that you mean by "new to the system", but it seems to me that that definition makes a calculator intelligent, which I can't agree with.
  - rcxdude 1mo ago
    Intelligence isn't a binary property. Is it really a problem to say that a calculator has some intelligence? That it's more intelligent than e.g. a rock?

duped 1mo ago

I don't think statistically driven prediction implies reasoning or intelligence.

malfist 1mo ago
Its a mirror to human intelligence. Regurgitating phrasing to match what someone who can reason put together, but it isn't any more intelligent than the reflection of you in the mirror is.
stevenhuang 1mo ago
First you need to prove that human cognitive function is also not fundamentally driven by statistical processes. It's possible that "statistically driven prediction" is all we are.

EA-3167 1mo ago

I suspect like most you don't appreciate how terrifying statistical relationships become when you have truly vast data sets to train on... and also that we as humans aren't as shockingly unique as we think (compared to other humans I mean).

prophesi 1mo ago

I'm guessing whether you believe it possesses intelligence or not depends on your answer to Searle's Chinese room thought experiment[0]. I'd also recommend checking out the Peter Watts' book, Blindsight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

staticman2 1mo ago
This comment thread was started with discussions of AI doing a bad job at a task (communication). Doesn't the Chinese Room posit an AI good at the task of communication?
- rcxdude 1mo ago
  The Chinese Room mainly just posits a room that passes the Turing Test, which LLMs do pretty well outside of outright adversarial situations.
  - codethief 1mo ago
    Do they? https://longbets.org/1/ https://longbets.org/1/ has yet to be settled. Either way, I doubt an LLM could fool anyone here who who knows how LLMs work into thinking it is human, at least not for an extended period of time (think about context length/compression, prompt injections, …).
    - idiotsecant 1mo ago
      You'll notice those goalposts are substantially stretched from the original test.
      - codethief 1mo ago
        How so?
- jay_kyburz 1mo ago
  AIs are better communicators that most of people I have worked with in my life. They are infinitely patient, don't mind going into more detail if I ask, not too bad at summary, have no ego and don't boast. They are also not too afraid of hurting my feelings, they will tell me my code sux if it does. I'd don't care if they fit a definition intelligent, they are good colleagues. They have strengths and weaknesses sure, but so do people.

mythrwy 1mo ago

While being very capable, AI is missing something required for true intelligence and I struggle to explain exactly what it is I see missing. It's not really "creativity" because much of that always was derivative in my opinion. And LLMs are (for some definition of the word) fairly creative as far as taking known elements and re-arranging them. I think what is missing is sort of a world model building capability. As humans we see phenomenon and classify them informally and model "what would it look like if this were the cause of that?" type scenarios. We see qualities in phenomena and realize this applies to other things even though the things may be completely different. We run informal "thought experiments" sort of. This is hard to duplicate because a lot (most?) of it occurs outside of systems of symbols like math and language with fixed rules in my opinion. Anyway yes, lots of human thinking is statistical and LLMs have that down pretty well but they are not "smart" I have concluded and it might be a very long time, if ever, until they are. That isn't to say they aren't very capable tools which they obviously are.

buzzin__ 1mo ago
So, right of the bat, you are warning us that you are going to apply the " no true Sscottman" fallacy, and that we should brace ourselves. Yes, models posses intelligence, but it is not a true one. Then you claim that models do not posses world-building capabilities. But this is simply not true. Even ignoring the whole subgenre of scientific papers on exactly that subject, it is not that hard to build some hypothetical scenarios, big or small, and then witness the ease with which models do navigate those worlds.
- layla5alive 1mo ago
  Yes. And they are criticizing a model for not having a default mode network - as if that is some impossibility rather than just an artifact of the current iteration of the specific architectures we have built so far. Why do people paint with these broad brushes over relatively specific complaints? LLMs are likely for machine intelligence something like drosophila are to biological intelligence - relatively early on the high dimensional spectrum of possibility. Though it stikes me that in a different way they're little alike - drosophila are relatively small and efficient.

ddj231 1mo ago

By that logic you’d have to call other algorithms intelligent. With more basic algorithms we know that it’s clearly the human programmer and the interpreter of the outputs that are intelligent and not the algorithm itself. For some reason with AI that goes out the window. I believe it should not.