> I can't imagine why someone would want to openly advertise that they're so closed minded.

I would say the exact same about you, rejecting an absolutely accurate and factual statement like that as closed minded strikes me as the same as the people who insist that medical science is closed minded about crystals and magnets.

I can't imagine why someone would want to openly advertise they think LLMs are actual intelligence, unless they were in a position to benefit financially from the LLM hype train of course.

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PaulDavisThe1st an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I have no financial position w.r.t. LLMs in any way that I am aware of (it is possible that some of the mutual funds I put money into have investments in companies that work with LLMs, but I know of no specifics there).

I am not ready to say that "LLMs are actual intelligence", and most of their publically visible uses seem to me to be somewhere between questionable and ridiculous.

Nevertheless, I retain a keen ... shall we call it anti-skepticism? ... that LLMs, by modelling language, may have accidentally modelled/created a much deeper understanding of the world than was ever anticipated.

I do not want LLMs to "succeed", I think a society in which they are common is a worse society than the one in which we lived 5 years ago (as bad as that was), but my curiosity is not abated by such feelings.

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woeirua 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cool, so clearly articulate the goal posts. What do LLMs have to do to convince you that they are intelligent? If the answer is there is no amount of evidence that can change your mind, then you're not arguing in good faith.

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shinycode an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It’s maybe an ethical and identity problem for most people. The idea that something not grounded in biology has somewhat the same « quality of intelligence » as us is disturbing. It rises so many uncomfortable questions like, should we accept to be dominated and governed by a higher intelligence, should we keep it « slave » or give it « deserved freedom ». Are those questions grounded in reality or intelligence is just decoupled from the realm of biology and we don’t have to consider them at all. Only biological « being » with emotions/qualia should be considered relevant as regards to intelligence which does not matter on its own but only if it embodies qualia ? It’s very new and a total shift in paradigm of life it’s hard to ask people to be in good faith here

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PaulDavisThe1st 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

But you don't and cannot know if qualia exist in a system, so how can that ever be a criteria for any kind of qualification?

	▲	shinycode 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That’s the main problem isn’t it ? Because it does matter and there is consequences to that like, should you « unplug » from the grid an AI ? Should we erase the memories of AI ? We eat animals and forbid eating humans, why ? Could we let AI « eat » some of us like in the matrix ? Should we consider it our equal or superior to us ? Should we give it the reigns of politics if it’s superior in decision making ? Or maybe the premise is « given all the knowledge that exists coupled with a good algorithm, you look/are/have intelligence » ? In which case intelligence is worthless in a way. It’s just a characteristic, not a quality. Which makes AI fantastic tools and never our equal ?

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rmunn an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe, I don't know, not be based on a statistical model?

Come on. If you are actually entertaining the idea that LLMs can possibly be intelligent, you don't know how they work.

But to take your silly question seriously for a minute, maybe I might consider LLMs to be capable of intelligence if they were able to learn, if they were able to solve problems that they weren't explicitly trained for. For example, have an LLM read a bunch of books about the strategy of Go, then actually apply that knowledge to beat an experienced Go player who was deliberately playing unconventional, poor strategies like opening in the center. Since pretty much nobody opens their Go game in the center (the corners are far superior), the LLM's training data is NOT going to have a lot of Go openings where one player plays mostly in the center. At which point you'll see that the LLM isn't actually intelligent, because an intelligent being would have understood the concepts in the book that you should mostly play in the corners at first in order to build territory with the smallest number of moves. But when faced with unconventional moves that aren't found anywhere on the Internet, the LLM would just crash and burn.

That would be a good test of intelligence. Learning by reading books, and then being able to apply that knowledge to new situations where you can't just regurgitate the training material.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Have you seen the now-years-old transcripts of "ancient" LLMs inventing new languages with grammar and syntax structures completely different from our own?