Comment by sdenton4

Hey, I also read that book, and came to basically the opposite conclusion!

The point of the book is that we've been very bad at testing animal intelligence because of a vast stack of human biases, including things like language and the geometry of our hands.

Animals with different geometries and no language are still intelligent, but we need to test them in ways which recognize their capabilities. Intelligence is general: it's adaptivity within one's set of constraints.

De waal also points out that there was massive shifting of the definition of language and intelligence as we became more aware of what animals are capable of.

From this angle, I would say that LLMs are intelligent: they do adapt to their inputs extremely readily, though they have a particular set of constraints (no physical body (usually), for starters). They are, like chimpanzees, smarter and more capable than humans in some ways, and much dumber in others.

Finally, the 'statistical learners can't be intelligent' line of argument is extremely short-sighted. Our brains are bags of electrified meat. Evolution somehow figured out a way to make meat think. No individual neutron is intelligent, yet the collection of cells is. We learn by processing experiences with hormonal signals because those hormonal signals are what the meat is capable of working with. LLMs, by contrast, learn by processing examples with backprop. If anything, the intelligence of meat is more surprising.