Which is why the term Artificial Intelligence is really a misnomer for LLMs. Artificial Mediocracy might be more fitting.
It is not possible to ask an LLM for factual knowledge, without providing it the source of the fact. Without a source of the fact, you can only ask an LLM to generate an answer to the question that is linguistically convincing. And they can do a really good job at that. They can accidentally encode factual knowledge by predicting the next word correctly, but that should be regarded as an accident.
Edit: And yeah, I think I know what you mean. The expectation (or hope) that collaboration of mediocre people results in some above-average end by means of some magical synergy effect very rarely works in real life.
So wouldn't 80 mean that someone is... kinda dumb?
So in one usage someone who is kinda dumb would still be intelligent, just less intelligent than others.
In another usage, we use the term to describe someone of above average intelligence (which is technically not really correct and actually not very intelligent).
100 IQ = 50% of the population is smarter than this.
80 IQ = not sure what the percentage is, but >50% of the population is smarter than this.
If any of the tables here are to be believed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#Historical_I...
then 80 IQ could mean 80% of the population is smarter.
I'll rephrase my "kinda dumb" to "dumb as rocks".
So, you’re not too far off numerically. 80 IQ is only a -1.33 Z-score. So, 9th percentile. 91% of people score higher than 80 IQ.
If by "intelligent" you're comparing with other primates, too, sure :-)
Intelligence is IMO an inherently comparative measure.
It's not "on/off", it's "smarter" (than a pile of rocks, than a slug, than another human).
So, yeah, you can be a dumb human but you'd be a smart chimpanzee. But we want to be comparing apples with apples in the context of this topic.
When people say "AI", everyone implicitly assumes the comparison with human intelligence. So "AI" needs to be as smart as the average human to be actual AI. Ok, AGI, if you prefer that term.
There's a reason AI is moving farther and farther away and we're creating new, finer, terms like ML, shape recognition, etc.
Do you also think that "intelligent alien life in space" means comparable to humans? What if we find something capable of reasoning, abstract thinking, rationality, adaptibility, etc - but much, much dumber than humans? That's intelligence, comparison to humans doesn't change anything about that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence - how could there be animal intelligence if "intelligence" means comparable to humans? "Crows are intelligent but nowhere near human-level" - this statement wouldn't make any sense if you're right, but it actually does make sense, IMHO.
> There's a reason AI is moving farther and farther away and we're creating new, finer, terms like ML, shape recognition, etc.
That thing with AI is called moving goalposts. And the finer terms - yeah of course we need to be able to be specific about our software, doesn't mean that's not AI. We talked about shape recognition in neuropsychology for much longer than in AI, same for many more terms that will certainly be reused soon.
I wouldn't use a score like IQ to define a treshold of "intelligence" in absolute terms. By definition, if you can score somewhere on the IQ scale, you have some intelligence. Otherwise your IQ would probably be N/A? (not sure, never looked that deeply into IQ tests=.
The way the “I” in AI is usually used seems to me to imply achieving average or better, so the aim is mediocre & upwards. steve1977 is agreeing with an opinion that results so far are at best “up to average”, maybe not even that, so more like mediocre & downwards. The phrase Artificial Mediocracy does not seem at all unfair in this context.
The opinion that current models can at best achieve average results overall seem logical to me: that are essentially summarizing a large corpus of human output rather than having original thought. While the systems may “notice” links average humans don't due to not being able to process large amounts of data like that, bringing the average quality of their output up, they are similarly likely to latch onto bad common practise/understanding bringing it back down again. Average results are mediocre results, by definition. Not bad, but not outstanding in any way.
--
[1] supposedly, there are strong views about IQ being a flawed measure/measure in some quarters
The interesting question is of course if that applies to LLMs or not. Are they actually intelligent or do they just look intelligent (and do we even have the means to answer those questions)?
Nerds will also get hung up on this because they can’t stand the notion that any aspect of their job doesn’t require their immense intelligence.
For most contexts, “will this tool help me”’is a much more appropriate question. Anyone conflating the two is doing themselves a disservice.
I mean a power drill is also helping me a lot, without being intelligent.
It's not an interesting question. It's pretty meaningless.
Are birds really flying or do they look like they are flying (perspective of the bee)?. Are planes really flying or do they look like they're flying ?
"Mimic Intelligence" is not a real distinction.
But every time we have an advance in machine learning, we seem to redefine intelligent activity to be beyond that. At a certain point, what is left?
Animals act on instinct that is hard coded based on the probability of survival AI essentially does the same thing it follows hardcoded probabilities not reason.