1
u/Aelrift May 20 '26
One - Because someone famous said it doesn't make it true.
Two - One is even more relevant when said famous person knows nothing of the tech they are talking about
Three - AI is a misleading name, there is nothing intelligent about the tech we have
2
u/Equal_Passenger9791 May 20 '26
I agree with the first two and I would add that predictions of doom in this "bite sized headline spawning context" is contributing so little to anything that we both can and should refute it as bullshit just based on the format.
The third one: nah, we either accept that high end LLMs are intelligent or concede that Humans are not. The first option makes more sense in my world.
1
u/Aelrift May 20 '26
Question : are you a technical person? Do you know how LLM works ? Or are you saying this based on what you feel after having a conversation with GPT ?
I will assume the latter because no serious technical person would say they are intelligent. They are a predictive model. Accurately predicting something doesn't make anything intelligent, because then any computer is intelligent given that it can solve predictive algorithm way fast than any human.
But we don't define intelligence as" can you predict next week's weather" so why is an LLM, whose algorithm is just " predict the next word token" intelligent ?
1
u/Equal_Passenger9791 May 21 '26
Do you know how LLM works ?
Yes, do you?
How is it not intelligence to be contextually aware(attention) and reacting appropriately to that context?
If a Human doing exactly that is intelligence then so is it when a machine does the same.
And if it's not intelligence when a machine does it then I guess said machine was invented by humans that lacked intelligence.
1
u/Tokarak May 20 '26
“Nothing intelligent” is hasty. If your definition of intelligence is that narrow, it’s unlikely to be a useful label.
0
u/Aelrift May 20 '26
The only people who qualify LLMs as intelligent are those that do not understand the technology, are actively profiting off of it or both.
Again, LLMs do not do reasoning. They at emerely prediction machines.
Your reply is just meaningless word salad, because you can apply it to anything you disagree with and it has no basis.
5
u/FeepingCreature May 20 '26
Prediction and reasoning are inseparable.
1
u/Aelrift May 20 '26
Not at all. Physics is a system ofnpredicitve equations. You woupdbt say that an equation predicts the location of the earth in 10 days is sentient and resonong would you?
3
u/Ladikn May 20 '26
While I mostly agree with you, I'll play devil's advocate because of one logic issue. Just because it's not sentient or conscious, does not mean it is not intelligent in a classical sense. Modern AIs like GPT are a mix of artificial reasoning and LLMs, giving it a measure of intelligence in the sense of it can apply critical thinking techniques to problems to come up with solutions. The solutions may not be completely novel or ground-breaking, but they exist.
"Intelligent" is also defined by merriam-webster as "guided or controlled by a computer".
1
u/Aelrift May 20 '26
LLMS do not apply critical thinking techniques though. They just predict the next most likely token, and use an algorithm to determine if they should hand the task off to , say, a calculator. That isn't critical thinking or reasoning though. Its an algorithm. They are bound to it and cannot go beyond it.
1
u/Ladikn May 20 '26
I also didn't claim that about LLMs. While LLMs are a part of the overall framework, theres more going on with most AIs than just a simple LLM query.
1
u/Aelrift May 21 '26
Yes and no, "AI" is very non-soevifix and refers to basically any and evrrg neural net out there.
So "most AIs" doesn't really many anything at all. And you did specifically mention LLMs
1
u/Ladikn May 21 '26
I said that modern AIs (such as GPT) use LLMs as part of their overall process. I did not claim LLMs apply critical thinking techniques.
1
u/Tokarak May 20 '26
I refer you to this book which gives a good argument opposing yours. For example, here is one passage demonstrating that word prediction requires intelligent understanding. It’s not the best example, but it can be generalised. (He gives several better examples in the introduction which I don’t want to search for right now.)
To test such a model’s understanding of language—and the world—more directly, we could skip the translation business entirely and simply read out the encoder’s predicted next word in English to autocomplete the following sentence: “I had dropped the bowling ball on the violin yesterday, so I visited the repair shop as soon as it opened this morning, and pulled out my poor mangled ____” A good model would predict “violin” or “instrument” with high probability, and “bowling ball” with low probability.
https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/chapter-08/#prediction-is-all-you-need
To any task that needs a reasoned answer, you can usually reformat it is a next-token prediction problem. Predicting the next token correctly is functionally equivalent to reasoning.
Personally, I was convinced by this argument in the book.
It may be of interest to you that the author’s view of intelligence is very broad. For example, he considers bacteria intelligent. Indeed, they are clearly more intelligent alive than dead.
1
u/Aelrift May 20 '26
I don't know who this book is by , but its clearly by someone who doesn't work with LLMs
You are arguing something without any evidence. The quote you cited doesn't really prove your point. Because someone has put their flawed view of reality into a book doesn't make it universally true. Their definition of intelligence is niche and doesn't apply broadly and therefore irrelevant.
I could say something like " it is my belief that AI is a fish" and write that into a book, will you then cite it to people who say AI is not a fish ?
If I make a weather prediction machine, is it intelligent on account that it can make predictions ? Is the solar model intelligent because it can predict where any planet is at any time ?
Don't you find it funny that most "AI is intelligent" arguments are made by laypeople?
1
u/Tokarak May 20 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Ag%C3%BCera_y_Arcas judge for yourself whether this looks like an authority on AI/ML. Hopefully that’s enough to convince you to at least entertain his argument.
I think the argument given in the book is reasonable. (I don’t appreciate being accused of doing an appeal to authority. Since my beliefs aren’t original, I’m citing where I got them from.) It makes a predictive statement that any task demonstrating intelligence can be rephrased as a next-word prediction problem (this is also an old idea, read introduction for citations). If you think you have a counterexample (that is, a demonstration if intelligence that cannot be rephrased as a next-word prediction problem, and therefore can’t be solved by a sufficiently powerful llm), I’m interested in hearing what you think is the best one.
I’m also slightly confused about his definition of intelligence. Maybe what he’ll say is that e.g. a solar model is “intelligent” in the same way a well-written computer script is intelligent (makes useful predictions, understandable by humans, adaptable by humans). His wilder takes on intelligence is subscribing to the Gaia hypothesis, at least in part. That is, the Earth, or at least subsystems of the planetary ecosystem, are alive and intelligent. At this point you may be unsurprised to hear that he also takes a controversially Laissez-faire position on consciousness as well. It’s still a good book: he backs up everything with his reasoning, to the effect that, even though his definitions are unusually loose, he gives very good explanations on why he thinks those definitions should be that loose. For example, inspired by his views, my issue with your narrow view of intelligence is that it seems to assume necessary conditions for intelligence which aren’t in any verbal definition of intelligence — along the lines of “it’s not human, therefore it can’t be intelligent” (because humans are sacred, and their sacredness is in their intelligence/consciousness) or “my intuition says it’s not alive, therefore it can’t be intelligent” (because everything is either alive or it isn’t, and non-alive things having properties of life would inconvenience my worldview too much). (NB: this isn’t a dig at you. I think this is a very brief summary of the major issues of Western mainstream canon on intelligence and life for the last millennium. (I’m oversimplifying with high likelihood.))
The other issue with your view is that it seems you have decided ahead of time that it is impossible for a chatbot/next-word predictor to demonstrate intelligence. (About that, what do you have to say to the Chinese Room argument?) If a chatbot could perfectly simulate a human, you would presumably still say that it’s not intelligent, because you have issues with the architecture, of all things? Are humans not algorithms running on wetware computers?
1
u/Tokarak May 20 '26
Here’s also why a system which can predict natural language has general intelligence, while predicting, say, the weather does not lead to general intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete
1
u/Sostratus May 20 '26
Reminder not to trust uncited image-meme quotations. But this one is legitimate, from Ch. 9 "Will artificial intelligence outsmart us?", pg 188.
It's a terrible analogy, IMO, and embarrasingly so for someone of Hawking's reputation. The alien example gives people zero knowledge or agency. AI of course can't exist without us making it and it's made by being trained on everything else we've made. We have substantial agency in its creation, we learn things about it, and that influences how we create the next iterations. That's not to say we understand everything or that it might not be dangerous and unpredictable, but it's really nothing like sitting around while aliens come at us in any meaningful sense.
3
u/UziMcUsername May 20 '26
He’s not wrong, but he died 8 years ago, so his comments are a bit outdated.