Comment by vouwfietsman
5 hours ago
Does a dog possess intelligence? Does a bird? Does a cricket? An amoeba?
I hate AI slop as much as the next guy but the amount of tribalism over AI is taking near-religious forms.
Nobody knows what intelligence is, therefore we don't know what does or does not possess it, therefore we don't know whether LLMs currently, or in the future, possess it.
Yes, LLMs can be stupid, guess what: so can I. That doesn't really change the argument at all.
I feel like I'm on a deja-vu from when DALL-E was released and everybody was fighting over whether AI can be creative yes or no. Same story, different words.
Intelligence, creativity: we have no idea what these words mean, and AI is helping us understand them better. That alone is an achievement of epic proportions. I am not joking here. Any computer scientist before 2015 would be absolutely blown away by what you can now do for 10 cents and an API call, yet somehow because of the tech-bro-iness of it all we get a tribal war over what is plainly visible in front of us:
LLMs are uncomfortably close to what we thought intelligent machines would look like
"Dumb next token predictor" keeps popping up since that is the core way they work. Since they aren't logic engines but prediction engines they will always return a result regardless what you ask it.
Some predictions might be the tokens "I don't know", but that is based on the model mapping your text to those tokens by having seen many similar "I don't know" responses to such contexts, it didn't do any introspective logic to produce that "I don't know", and its possible it actually does know if it followed another branch there so "I don't know" is often not even true.
If they had an introspective part that stops the prediction when its too unreliable it would no longer just be token prediction engine, and I believe we need such a part for them to become what I call smart. I don't think LLM will ever stop being dumb without such an introspective part to them.
And no, that introspective part is not a part of the token predictor. At least not in us humans, the feeling of certainty we have is not a prediction, it is bundled with our thoughts, so we get both "answer is a bear" and "certainty is low", we don't get just one of those as a "prediction".
Will LLM become smart as humans with such an introspective part? I don't know, but I think they will never become as smart as humans without one.
Note: The certainty score has to be per conclusion or response, not per token. You can't evaluate a responses validity by aggregating the weight of each token. Meaning its a logic engine, not token engine, that evaluates the certainty of a statement being correct or not instead of a token being correct or not. That is the level human thinking works at and seems to be dramatically more efficient.
> I don't think LLM will ever stop being dumb without such an introspective part to them.
The very second they add this part, it will "just be a dumb token predictor with introspection", mark my words.
If it keeps doing dumb things, yeah. But if that actually solves it then those opinions will quickly disappear when it replaces all human white collar work since it does it cheaper and better and faster.
AGI is fairly easy to detect for this reason. Does this system make a majority feel you don't have to hire people anymore? If not its not AGI.
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Necessary is not the same as sufficient.
If I want my ox-cart to fly, I need to add wings, but that's probably not all that needs changing.
I strongly suspect that if you dug deeply enough into how a human brain does reasoning, the answer would boil down to "it tries a bunch of pathways and picks the one that seems right". Pathways weighted by experience, but ultimately still guess-and-check. What would the alternative be?
Maybe our ability to reason is not as mystical and special as our ego might hope it to be, and discomfort over LLM's bringing that to light is the root of some people's urge to continuously downplay and discredit them.
(As far as I can tell as a non-neuroscientist, the literature on how our default mode network and prefrontal cortex interact agrees with my assessment - free association and logical verification respectively)
You have introspection, you can see a part of your thoughts, you know how that introspective part works since its what we call consciousness, you are conscious about it.
That introspection isn't an illusion, what your consciousness see of your thoughts obviously are tings that has been calculated and aggregated by the brain, so we know the brain calculates and aggregates those thoughts and feelings to produce its results. And we know LLM doesn't do that, it doesn't have a side system that does that sort of introspection.
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