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Comment by doug713705

16 hours ago

As far as I know, and I'm no expert in the field, there is no known example of intelligence without sentience. Actual AI is basically algorithm and statistics simulating intelligence.

Can you spell out your definition of 'intelligence'? (I'm not looking to be ultra pedantic and pick holes in it -- just to understand where you're coming from in a bit more detail.) The way I think of it, there's not really a hard line between true intelligence and a sufficiently good simulation of intelligence.

  • I would say that "true" intelligence will allow someone/something to build a tool that never existed before while intelligence simulation will only allow someone/something to reproduce tools that already known. I would make a difference between someone able to use all his knowledge to find a solution to a problem using tools he knows of and someone able to discover a new tool while solving the same problem. I'm not sure the latter exists without sentience.

    • I honestly don't think humans fit your definition of intelligent. Or at least not that much better than LLMs.

      Look at human technology history...it is all people doing minor tweaks on what other people did. Innovation isn't the result of individual humans so much as it is the result of the collective of humanity over history.

      If humans were truly innovative, should we not have invented for instance at least a way of society and economics that was stable, by now? If anything surprise me about humans it is how "stuck" we are in the mold of what others humans do.

      Circulate all the knowledge we have over and over, throw in some chance, some reasoning skills of the kind LLMs demonstrate every day in coding, have millions of instances most of whom never innovate anything but some do, and a feedback mechanism -- that seems like human innovation history to me, and does not seem like demonstrating anything LLMs clearly do not possess. Except of course not being plugged into history and the world the way humans are.