Comment by miyoji
7 days ago
"Intelligence" isn't a commodity at all. It doesn't make a lick of sense.
The value of intelligence is that it can solve my specific problems in ways that are satisfying to me. The example the article uses is a CRUD app - but the CRUD app I need isn't fungible with the CRUD app you need! It's not fungible at all, it's a specific solution to a specific problem that may have zero value to anyone else, and certainly cannot be replaced with anyone else's solution to their problems.
If we're comparing electricity to gasoline, then models are cars, and "intelligence" (I disagree that this is what LLMs produce, but whatever) is distance traveled.
Distance traveled is not a commodity. It's the desired outcome.
I think he's creating a definition for an abstract thing here, and using the word "intelligence" to represent that abstract thing.
In your analogy, the "CRUD app" is analogous to the car, but that's not what Thompson is defining to be the unit of "intelligence". He's saying that some number of units of "intelligence" are necessary to create that CRUD app, somewhat analogously to how some number of units of energy are necessary to create a car.
But I agree with you that this concept of a "unit of intelligence" that he's using is probably too abstract to ever be usefully well defined.