Does it seem like it bifurcates based on the person? I've had both experiences myself, sometimes with the same model and within ~days of each other on seemingly similar tasks. It's almost impossible to deny sometimes that actual intelligence is being expressed (and could not be regurgitated intelligence from some random internet page), but then I see firsthand the eye-rolling "intelligence-shaped" output from something else and wonder where I went wrong.

It kinda feels like Michigan J Claude sometimes.

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MarkusQ 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's almost impossible to deny sometimes that actual intelligence is being expressed (and could not be regurgitated intelligence from some random internet page)

But how is it impossible? Or rather, how is it possible to distinguish actual intelligence from some internet page--not "some random internet page", but some very well selected, timely and topical internet page?

Carly Simon's "Killing Me Softly" describes a similar experience, decades before LLMs. It's amazingly easy to feel like someone is understanding you when they are just pattern matching on a common shared experience.

This seems so likely that I have a hard time understanding why some people think it's impossible.

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saulpw 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I know; if I hadn't experienced it myself, I would have a hard time believing it. Even if we grant that it's "merely" as you say, that it can interpret my loose and often false or misleading rhetoric to identify my question, trawl through thousands of lines of code to determine the core problem, select some very specific and relevant internet page, and then translate its solution fresh into my own problem domain; that in my mind at least "an expression of intelligence", even if it is not truly intelligent or understanding.

FWIW this is my own mental gymnastics around the Chinese Room; at some point the question "where is the understanding?" is moot, because if the Chinese Room reliably delivers context-specific correct results in unique contexts, then what more do we require of intelligence? I have to admit that sometimes it does better than I can do, and I've been called intelligent by intelligent people my whole life.

(BTW Killing Me Softly wasn't written/sung/anything by Carly Simon, but composed by Charles Fox with lyrics by Norman Gimbel, in collaboration with Lori Lieberman [after she was inspired by a Don McLean performance in late 1971].)

	▲	MarkusQ an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> if the Chinese Room reliably delivers context-specific correct results in unique contexts, then what more do we require of intelligence? First, I'm not sure I grant the premise (esp. "reliably"), but even so the answer seems glaringly obvious: we require intelligence to extend the range of what is known so that it can be looked up / delivered by systems like libraries, search engines, and LLMs. The conflation of knowledge indexing and knowledge creation (and, more specifically, that some people don't seem to be able to distinguish them) may be the core of the issue. > BTW Killing Me Softly wasn't written/sung/anything by Carly Simon Yeah, I probably hallucinate that. :P
	▲	Smoosh 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Thanks for that final BTW which sent me on a side quest to listen to a half dozen different versions and gave me a completely different outlook on what that song was about and what it was saying. Made it even more poignant.