Comment by quantpunk

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."