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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously, LLMs aren't at the level of human cognition, but the impressive results they do produce, given their obvious simplicity, hints that intelligence may not be as hard to reproduce in silicon as we have previously assumed.

People said this about calculators as well, or initial chess AI as well. "If computers can do this, then the remaining parts of intelligence is probably not hard to reproduce!".

So we already know many humans massively underestimate the depth of human intelligence. It happened many times before and will continue to happen every time we make computers do anything new.

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> People said this about calculators as well, or initial chess AI as well. "If computers can do this, then the remaining parts of intelligence is probably not hard to reproduce!".

People also said that chess computers would never beat the best humans. And then when that happened they said, "well they're just using sheer brute force, they will never produce beautiful chess". And then Alpha Zero came along, and showed that prediction was wrong as well.

Personally, I believe that silicon intelligence will evolve a lot faster than ours did. But regardless, I've yet to hear any convincing argument why it can't happen eventually.

> I've yet to hear any convincing argument why it can't happen eventually.

That is a strawman, basically nobody argues this.

> People also said that chess computers would never beat the best humans

How many did say this? I see way more overly optimistic "humans are stupid" messages than I see "computers will never beat humans" messages. The argument is mostly between "humans are obsolete in a decade at most" versus "we would be lucky to see general intelligence in our lifetime", not that it it is impossible.

>How many did say this?

I don't know about chess, though earlier computers didn't have the power, so people could've reasonably said that.

But we certainly saw it with Go. Many people said that a computer could beat a person at chess or checkers, because they were simple, limited games, but Go was too complicated, too many possible combinations. A computer could never beat a Go champion. And here we are, with multiple generations of AlphaGo pushing the boundaries. They might use a couple thousand CPUs and a few hundred GPUs, but they can do the impossible thing.

> A computer could never beat a Go champion

* Using the algorithms they used to beat humans at chess.

I were there during those discussions, the AI optimists argued that since computers could beat humans at chess GAI would soon be here. Then it is reasonable to argue that even a simple game like GO is impossible to solve the way we solved chess, so there needs to be more fundamental breakthroughs before GAI can happen.

That same thing is playing out today, and the AI proponents are still misunderstanding the other sides argument. The argument isn't "computers can never do this", the argument is "the algorithms and methods we use today can't do this, so there is no clear path to intelligence from where we are".

> That is a strawman, basically nobody argues this.

Some people do. Some people believe that intelligence is much more fundamental to the universe, and not capable of being reproduced mechanistically.

But if you grant that it is possible, all we're talking about is when; which is anyone's guess. It could be tomorrow, it could take a million years. I'm not pretending to know, just offering a different perspective than the original comment.

But those "some people" aren't here. What we are discussing is how close LLM are to human reasoning. Many argue LLM are already there, "what evidence do you have that humans aren't essentially just an LLM?" basically. You see such posts in this very thread.

> That is a strawman, basically nobody argues this.

I mean, people do-- even smart people like Penrose.

But a large majority of people who say "LLMs are nothing like humans" are not making that argument. If you look through these kind of threads on HN you see maybe one post making that argument among hundreds, that is "basically nobody" to me given how often that strawman is used against people who are skeptical about LLMs potential capabilities.

I don't think LLMs are going to get us to AGI on their own, but it's a massive step: an obviously more fruitful one than Deep Blue or even AlphaZero, and also obviously more useful and disruptive to society.

Some people think we can't get to "real" intelligence through Turing-equivalents. Some think we can just tack a little more on an LLM and be there. It's probably something between, but the past-me who thought AGI was definitely >40 years away is much less convinced of this now.

Could it happen in the next 5 years? Proooooobably not, but is there a significant chance? Yes.

This isn't a response to the OPs point, where they've stated their beliefs and their logic for them.

To it, you've basically said: "well in that case defend the times some other people have been incorrect if you're sure this time".

Why should they? The OP might be wrong, but whether they are or aren't has nothing to do with whether some unrelated, half-remembered third parties were right or wrong when mispredicting something else. You haven't addressed the content of the OP's actual argument at all, nor established a basis on which it may share similarity with other mispredictions.

> but whether they are or aren't has nothing to do with whether some unrelated, half-remembered third parties were right or wrong

Their argument was "Alternatively, we overestimate human abilities". Since he made that argument it is relevant to see if humans overestimated or underestimated human abilities in the past. My argument is that there is a large tendency for smart people and researchers to underestimate human intelligence, to assume it is easy to solve, we have seen that happen many times in the past.

So since smart humans often underestimate human abilities, the "we overestimate human abilities" theory is probably not correct.

Except that isn't true at all: the history of animal research is one of us assigning all human behavior as "uniquely human, requiring great human intelligence" and then discovering it's either replicated in detail in other "lower" animals, or replicated by animals which don't have nearly the apparent cognitive capacity for it[1].

We have an enormous history of vastly over-estimating the intelligence needed for some behaviors to manifest, with the more accurate conclusion being that actually we simply don't understand the nature of intelligence very well.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5394149/

You suggest we under-estimate animal intelligence, which is the same argument I'm making. The reason we underestimate how hard human intelligence is to solve is that we underestimate the animal part of our reasoning, animals can't play chess or do math or write sentences, so when computers do that people assume they are smart like humans. But that assumption hinges on the animal part, like navigating a forest, identifying plants to eat etc, isn't a fundamental part of intelligence or that it is easy to solve in comparison.

So yeah, underestimating animal intelligence is a large part of it, I agree with you.

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