Comment by wavemode
13 days ago
An easy counterargument is that - there are millions of species and an uncountable number of organisms on Earth, yet humans are the only known intelligent ones. (In fact high intelligence is the only trait humans have that no other organism has.) That could perhaps indicate that intelligence is a bit harder to "find" than you're claiming.
That humans are the only known intelligent ones is a very dubious statement. The most intelligent, sure, but several species of birds, great apes, and cetaceans all display significant intelligence.
> The most intelligent, sure, but several species of birds, great apes, and cetaceans all display significant intelligence.
Relative to all other non-humans. If someone is reducing intelligence to a boolean, the threshold can of course go anywhere.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone can get a dog to (technically) pass a GCSE (British highschool) exam (not full subject just exam) for a language other than English, because one dog learned a thousand words and that might just technically be enough for a British student to get a minimum pass in a French GCSE listening test.
But nobody sane ever hired a non human animal to solve a problem that humans consider intellectually challenging.
If intelligence is ability to learn from few examples, all mammals (and possibly all animals I'm not sure about insects) beat all machine learning and by a large margin. If it is the ability to learn a lot and synthesise combinations from those things, LLMs beat any one of us by a large margin and are only weak when compared to humanity as a whole rather than a specific human. If it is peak performance, narrow AI (non-LLM) beats us in a handfull of cases, as do non-human animals in some cases, while we beat all animals and all ML in the majority of things we care about.
Driving is still an example of a case where humans hold the peak performance.
> If someone is reducing intelligence to a boolean, the threshold can of course go anywhere.
Indeed, it would be very surprising if multiple species had exactly the same intelligence. It's more likely there this variable samples some distribution. Of course the species at the top can set the threshold so that all other species don't meet it, if they feel like declaring themselves uniquely intelligent. But that's not very useful.
> Driving is still an example of a case where humans hold the peak performance.
Other great apes can drive too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY
I think it's very hard to look at this video and not recognize that orangutans are intelligent
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