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Comment by aezart | Hacker News Reader

If I ask a human what their favorite flavor of ice cream is, they will answer based on their actual preference for different kinds of ice cream.

If I ask a chat LLM what its favorite flavor of ice cream is, it will select a statistically likely answer to the question.

That's the difference.

For reference: my favorite ice cream flavor is cake batter, but only if it's the one at Cold Stone. If it's from somewhere else, I go with cookie dough.

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It seems to me that most of these arguments boil down to “it didn’t think or respond like I would expect a human to, therefore it isn’t intelligent.” This isn’t open minded to the diverse possibilities of non human intelligence, nor is it demonstrating a lack of understanding or real limitation. It doesn’t seem to have any sense of self beyond playing characters it was asked to play, yet those characters are able to intelligently select actions towards goals they were assigned by a prompt using creativity, complex reasoning, and deep understanding. This is a difference that isn’t an inferiority or shortcoming.

I would even argue that humans are more similar to that than we think. The main difference is that one of the characters is locked to the surface most of the time (not even very perfectly).

GPT’s only sensor input is text, but if it were able to taste maybe it would learn a favorite ice cream flavor too.

Why do you prefer cake batter ice cream? Because of some sequence of events leading up to present point in time (not unlike training), and/or random genetic variations (not unlike setting “temperature” parameter in GPT to >0)

Someone's actual preference is stored in their memory. If you give the LLM access to a database that includes "preferences", I'm sure it will be able to retrieve that.

If it's preference is a variable that exists because a human thinks it would make sense to another human it has no connection with reality.

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