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Comment by raincole

6 days ago

In other words, it's solving a problem.

Yes, but is it "intelligence" is a valid question. We have known for a long time that computers are a lot faster than humans. Get a dumb person who works fast enough and eventually they'll spit out enough good work to surpass a smart person of average speed.

It remains to be seen whether this is genuinely intelligence or an infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters situation. And I'm not sure why this specific example is worthy enough to sway people in one direction or another.

  • Someone actually mathed out infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters, and it turns out, it is a great example of how misleading probabilities are when dealing with infinity:

    "Even if every proton in the observable universe (which is estimated at roughly 1080) were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a far greater amount of time – more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer – to have even a 1 in 10500 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 observable universes made of protonic monkeys."

    Often infinite things that are probability 1 in theory, are in practice, safe to assume to be 0.

    So no. LLMs are not brute force dummies. We are seeing increasingly emergent behavior in frontier models.

    • > So no. LLMs are not brute force dummies. We are seeing increasingly emergent behavior in frontier models.

      Woah! That was a leap. "We are seeing ... emergent behaviors" does not follow from "it's not brute force".

      It is unsurprising that an LLM performs better than random! That's the whole point. It does not imply emergence.

      2 replies →

    • > We are seeing increasingly emergent behavior in frontier models.

      What? Did you see one crying?

  • Maybe infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters hitting the statistically most likely next key based on their training.

  • The real question is how to define intelligence in a way that isn't artificially constrained to eliminate all possibilities except our own.

Bet you didn't come up with that comment by first discarding a bunch of unsuitable comments.

  • I hired an artist for an oil painting.

    The artist drew 10 pencil sketches and said "hmm I think this one works the best" and finished the painting based on it.

    I said he didn't one shot it and therefore he has no ability to paint, and refused to pay him.

  • You learned what was unsuitable over your entire life until now by making countless mistakes in human interaction.

    A basic AI chat response also doesn't first discard all other possible responses.

A random sentence can also generate correct solution to a problem once in a long while...does not mean that it "solved" anything..