Comment by einrealist
2 hours ago
I don't trust anyone who claims that LLMs today are superhumanly intelligent. All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning', all while subsidising the real costs to capture the market. So much SciFi BS and extrapolation about a technology that is useful if adopted with care.
This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of power between a few organizations with untrustworthy incentives and leadership.
If all they do is "just" brute-force problem solving, then they are already bound to take over R&D & other knowledge work and exponentially accelerate progress, i.e. the SciFi "singularity" BS ends up happening all the same. Whether we classify them as true reasoning is just semantics.
> All they do is perform compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space and call it 'reasoning'
If they discover the cure to cancer, I don't care how they did it. "I don't trust anyone who claims they're superhumanly intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".
It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.
If LLMs can come up with superhumanly intelligent solutions, then they're superhumanly intelligent, period. Whether they do this by magic or by stochastic whatever doesn't make any difference at all.
That's moonshot logic that reinforces the parent's point. You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment.
"The cure for cancer" as a phrase doesn't include those solutions. If the headline was "Pope discovers the cure for cancer" and those were his solutions you would say "No he didn't." OP was referring to AI discovering the cure for cancer that cancer research is working towards.
> You'd absolutely care if the AI's cure to cancer entailed full-body transplants or dismemberment
That's not a cure. Like yes, I'd care if the AI says it cures cancer while nuking Chicago. But that isn't what OP said.
Your brain is performing "compute-intensive brute-force attacks on the problem/solution space" as you read this very sentence. You trained patterns on English syntax, structure, and semantics since you were a child and it is supporting you now with inference (or interpretation). And, for compute efficiency, you probably have evolution to thank.
people like to say this like they’re apples to apples but this comparison isn’t remotely how the brain actually works - and even if it did, the brain does it automatically without direction and at an infitesimal percentage of the power required.
And we’re just talking about cognition - it completely ignores the automatic processes such as maintaining and regulating the body and it’s hormones, coordinating and maintaining muscles, visual/spacial processing taking in massive amounts of data at a very fine scale, and informing the body what to do with it - could go on.
One of the more annoying things about this conversation is you don’t even need to make this argument to make the point you’re trying to make, but people love doing it anyway. It needlessly reduces how amazing the human brain is to a bunch of catchy sci fi sounding idioms.
It can be simultaneously true that transformer based language models can be very smart and that the human brain is also very smart. It genuinely confuses me why people need to make it an either/or.
Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many parenthesis are balanced here ((((()))))) (you can test this), it doesn't have any kind of genuine cognition.
> Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition."
I've wondered about this. Do we really know enough about what the human brain is doing to make a statement like this? I feel like if we did, we would be able to model it faithfully and OpenAI, etc. would not be doing what they're doing with LLMs.
What if human cognition turns out to be the biological equivalent of a really well-tuned prediction machine, and LLMs are just a more rudimentary and less-efficient version of this?
This is such a boring cliche by now. "thinking" and "knowing what it's doing" are totally vague statements that we barely understand about the human mind but in every comment section about AI people definitively state that LLMs don't do them, whatever they are.
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If you think this way then why not talk to LLMs exclusively. Don’t let the oxytocin cloud your ability to problem solve.
I get you're trying to do the whole "humans and LLMs are the same" bit, but it's just plainly false. Please stop.
Yeah and everything is just atoms. If you reduce anything enough it’s not real.
calculator is superhumanly intelligent