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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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The point is that AI stands for “artificial intelligence” and these systems are not intelligent. You can argue that AI has come to mean something else, and that’s a reasonable argument. But LLMs are nothing but a shitload of vector data and matrix math. They are no more intelligent than an insect is intelligent. I don’t particularly care about the term “AI” but I will die on the “LLMs are not intelligent” hill.
I won't fight you on that hill but I also think you're putting human intelligence on a pedestal that it doesn't really deserve. Intelligence is just responding to stimuli and while current AI can't rival human intelligence it's not inconceivable it could happen in the next two generations.
I am certain that it will happen eventually. And I am not arguing that something has to be human-level intelligent to be considered intelligent. See dogs, pigs, dolphins, etc. But IMO there is a huge qualitative difference between how an LLM operates and how animal intelligence operates. I am certain we will eventually create intelligent systems but there is a massive gulf between what LLMs are capable of and abstract reasoning. And it seems extremely unlikely to me that linear algebraic models will ever achieve that type of intelligence.
Bacteria respond to stimuli. Would you call them intelligent?
I'm not certain - probably not but I'm not certain where to draw the line. A cat is definitely intelligent, so is a cow - the fact that I don't think bacteria is intelligent might be a question of scale or de deanthropomorphism... but intelligence probably only emerges in multicellular organisms.
My point is that I strongly feel that the kind of "AI" we have today is much closer to bacteria than to cats on that scale. Not that an LLM belongs on the same scale as biological life, but the point stands in so far as "is this thing intelligent" as far as I'm concerned.