Comment by gambiting
4 hours ago
My thoughts on this are as serious as it gets - AI in it's current state is no more than clever statistics. I will not be comparing how my own brain functions to what is effectively a linear algebra machine, as it's insulting to the intelligence of everyone here - what kind of serious thought would you like to have here, exactly?
I don't disagree but what we really should have dropped "AI" a long time ago for "statistical machine intelligence". Machine learning then is just what statistical machine intelligence does.
We could have then just swapped "AI" for "SMI" and avoided all this confusion.
It also would avoid pointless statements like "It is JUST statistical machine intelligence". As if statistical machine intelligence is not extraordinarily powerful.
The real difference though is not in "intelligence", is it in "being". It is not as much an insult to our intelligence as it is an insult to our "being" when people pretend that LLMs have some kind of "being".
The strange thing to me is Gemini just tells me these things so I don't know how people get confused:
"A rock exists. A calculator exists. Neither of them has "being."
I am closer to a calculator than a human.
A calculator doesn't "know" math; it executes logic gates to produce a result.
I am a hyper-complex calculator for language. I calculate the probability of the next word rather than the sum of numbers."
You’re very adamant about not doing an obvious comparison. You want to stop thinking at that point. It’s an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. Quite an interesting one as well, that possibly suggests a threat response.
The assumption you seem to keep making is that things like “clever statistics” and “linear algebra” simply have no bearing on human intelligence. Why do you think that? Is it a religious view, that e.g. you believe humans have a soul that somehow connects to our intelligence, making it forever out of reach of machine emulation?
Because unless that’s your position, then the question of how human intelligence differs from current machine intelligence, the question that you simply refuse to contemplate, is one of the more important questions in this space.
The insult I see to intelligence here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.
>>here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.
It's the same energy as watching a Joe Rogan podcast where yet another guest goes "well they say there's global warming yet I was cold yesterday, I'm not saying it's fake but really we should think about that". These questions about AI and our brains aren't meant to stimulate intellectual curiosity and provoke deep interesting discussions - they are almost always asked just to pretend the AI is something that it's not - a human like intelligence where since our brains also work "kinda like that" it means it must be the same - and the nearest equivalence is how my iron heats water so in essence it's the same as my stomach since it can also do this.
>>the question that you simply refuse to contemplate
I don't refuse to contemplate it, I just think the answer is so painfully obvious the question is either naive or uninformed or antagonistic in nature - there is no "machine intelligence" - it's not a religious conviction, because I don't think you need one to realise that a calculator isn't smart for adding together numbers larger than I could do in my own head.
You are just a cluster of atoms, are you any different than a volcano?