Comment by slopinthebag
6 days ago
I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point. Since that's an ongoing debate without a resolution thus far.
But you claimed that humans aren't unique. I think it's pretty obvious we are on many dimensions including what you might classify as "intelligence". You don't even necessarily have to believe in a "soul" or something like that, although many people do. The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this.
> There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical.
Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.
> I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point.
Agreed.
> But you claimed that humans aren't unique.
I'm arguing that it is up to us to prove that they are interestingly unique in the context of this post. Which is pretty narrow - how do we solve problems?
The theme I was arguing against that I've seen repeated throughout this thread is that AIs are just recombining things they've absorbed and throwing those recombinations at the wall until they see what sticks.
It raises the question of why we presume that humans do things any differently, when it seems quite clear that we can only ever possibly do the same, unless we are claiming that knowledge of the universe can enter the human mind through some means other than through the known senses.
Not at all disputing that humans possess many capabilities that AIs do not.
> Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.
I touched on this elsewhere, will go ahead and paste it here again:
The fundamental thing I'm speaking out against is the arrogance of human exceptionalism.
This whole debate about what it means to be intelligent or human just seems like we're making the same mistakes we've made over and over.
Earth as the center of the universe, sun as the center of the universe, man as the only animal with consciousness and intellect, the anthropomorphic nature of the majority of the deities in our religions and the anthropocentric purpose of the universe within those religions...
I think this desire to believe that we are special, that the universe in some way does ultimately revolve around us, is seemingly a deep need in our psyche but any material analysis of our universe shows that it is extremely unlikely that we hold that position.
>The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date
What does this mean ? Are you saying every human could have achieved this result ? Or this ? https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/
because well, you'd be wrong.
>, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this.
Human intelligence was brute forced. Please let's all stop pretending like those billions of years of evolution don't count and we poofed into existence. And you can keep parroting 'simulacrum of intelligence' all you want but that isn't going to make it any more true.
> The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date
Meaning however you (reasonably) define intelligence, if you compare humans to any AI system humans are overwhelmingly more capable. Defining "intelligence" as "solving a math equation" is not a reasonable definition of intelligence. Or else we'd be talking about how my calculator is intelligent. Of course computers can compute faster than we can, that's aside the point.
> Human intelligence was brute forced.
No, I don't mean how the intelligence evolved or was created. But if you want to make that argument you're essentially asserting we have a creator, because to "brute force" something means it was intentional. Evolution is not an intentional process, unless you believe in God or a creator of sorts, which is totally fair but probably not what you were intending.
But my point is that LLM's essentially arrive at answers by brute force through search. Go look at what a reasoning model does to count the letters in a sentence, or the amount of energy it takes to do things humans can do with orders of magnitude less (our brain runs on %20 of a lightbulb!).
> But my point is that LLM's essentially arrive at answers by brute force through search.
If "brute force" worked for this, we wouldn't have needed LLMs; a bunch of nested for-loops can brute force anything.
The reason why LLMs are clearly "magic" in ways similar to our own intelligence (which we very much don't understand either) is precisely because it can actually arrive at an answer without brute force, which is computationally prohibitive for most non-trivial problems anyway. Even if the LLM takes several hours spinning in a reasoning loop, those millions tokens still represent a minuscule part of the total possible solution space.
And yes, we're obviously more efficient and smarter. The smarter part should come as no surprise given that our brains have vastly more "parameters". The efficient part is definitely remarkable, but completely orthogonal to the question of whether the phenomenon exhibited is fundamentally the same or not.
>Meaning however you (reasonably) define intelligence, if you compare humans to any AI system humans are overwhelmingly more capable.
Really ? Every Human ? Are you sure ? because I certainly wouldn't ask just any human for the things I use these models for, and I use them for a lot of things. So, to me the idea that all humans are 'overwhelmingly more capable' is blatantly false.
>Defining "intelligence" as "solving a math equation" is not a reasonable definition of intelligence.
What was achieved here or in the link I sent is not just "solving a math equation".
>Or else we'd be talking about how my calculator is intelligent.
If you said that humans are overwhelmingly more capable than calculators in arithmetic, well I'd tell you you were talking nonsense.
>Of course computers can compute faster than we can, that's aside the point.
I never said anything about speed. You are not making any significant point here lol
>No, I don't mean how the intelligence evolved or was created.
Well then what are you saying ? Because the only brute-forced aspect of LLM intelligence is its creation. If you do not mean that then just drop the point.
>But if you want to make that argument you're essentially asserting we have a creator, because to "brute force" something means it was intentional.
First of all, this makes no sense sorry. Evolution is regularly described as a brute force process by atheist and religious scientists alike.
Second, I don't have any problem with people thinking we have a creator, although that instance still does necessarily mean a magic 'poof into existence' reality either.
>But my point is that LLM's essentially arrive at answers by brute force through search.
Sorry but that's just not remotely true. This is so untrue I honestly don't know what to tell you. This very post, with the transcript available is an example of how untrue it is.
>or the amount of energy it takes to do things humans can do with orders of magnitude less (our brain runs on %20 of a lightbulb!).
Meaningless comparison. You are looking at two completely different substrates. Do you realize how much compute it would take to run a full simulation of the human brain on a computer ? The most powerful super computer on the planet could not run this in real time.
6 replies →
It's very telling that you put "materialist" and "anti-human" in the same bucket.
> I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.
I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual.
What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so.
There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle...
But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).
It's funny because the fundamental thing I'm speaking out against is the arrogance of human exceptionalism.
This whole debate about what it means to be intelligent or human just seems like we're making the same mistakes we've made over and over.
Earth as the center of the universe, sun as the center of the universe, man as the only animal with consciousness and intellect, the anthropomorphic nature of the majority of the deities in our religions and the anthropocentric purpose of the universe within those religions...
I think this desire to believe that we are special, that the universe in some way does ultimately revolve around us, is seemingly a deep need in our psyche but any material analysis of our universe shows that it is extremely unlikely that we hold that position.
The need for human exceptionalism doesn't come from the psyche or anything like that, it's just basic survival skills. Humans believe themselves to be special because that's the only belief that isn't self-destructive.
You can choose to believe humans are not exceptional, in the same way I can choose to cut off all my fingers and eat them. Why would I do that?
If what you say about LLMs is true, that's bad for me. And for you. And for our families. Because it means our instrinic value of living just went down a lot. I choose not to believe it because I am not suicidal. And, ultimately, I think the people who do believe it can only ever make their lives worse. Probably my life worse too, but maybe if I'm all the way over here I'll avoid the blast radius.
I largely agree with you, but I also see this same type of thinking appear in people who I know are not arrogant - at least in the techbroisk way.