LLMs are extremely amazing autocomplete mechanisms. But that’s all they are at the core - there’s no intelligence involved.
When it comes to complex step-by-step reasoning, sure, they're stupid; when it comes to linguistic comprehension, are better at this than the average human — and GPT-4 beats the average law students taking at least one bar exam.
There's no intelligence involved in "artificial intelligence" as it currently stands. It's all marketing hype around a really fancy statistical completion engine. Intelligence would require thought and reasoning, which current "AI" does not do, no matter how convincingly it fakes it.
We used to measure intelligence with IQ tests, those are now known to largely be bunk. What's to say our other intelligence tests aren't similarly flawed?
Or rather let me pose this question. What is the intellectual test you envisions that proves an AI is intelligent that any non-disabled human can easily pass. I'm willing to bet 500 USD it will pass that hurdle in the coming 10 years if you are willing to put your money where your mouth is.
Indeed, you can see something like ChatGPT fall down by simply asking a modified form of a real IQ test question.
For example, ChatGPT answers a sample Stanford binet question "Counting from 1 to 100, how many 6s will you encounter?" correctly, but if you slightly modify it and ask how many 7s instead, it will only count 19.
Having written this out however, I've now invalidated the question since they use webcrawls to train.
I used to see people getting criticised for being "book-smart" and lacking practical experience… but someone who was able to learn from books can quickly learn from real life, too.
AI need a lot of examples to learn from, and make up for this by being on hardware that beats biological neurones by the same degree to which marathon runners beat continental drift, so it can go through those examples much faster, leading to fantastic performance.
But the shape of that performance graph is very un-human — you never see a human that's approximately 80-90% accurate at every level of mathematics from basic algebra to helping Terence Tao: https://pandaily.com/mathematician-terence-tao-comments-on-c...
> A farmer stands on the side of a river with a sheep. There is a boat on the riverbank that has room for exactly one person and one sheep. How can the farmer get across with the sheep in the fewest number of trips?
It's obviously riffing on the classic wolf sheep lettuce riddle, but I don't think that's gonna fool any humans into answering anything but the obvious. ChatGPT-4o on the other hand thinks it'll take three trips.
They perform a good approximation of intelligence most of the time but the fact that their error pattern is so distinct from humans in some ways, suggests that we probably shouldn't attribute intelligence to them. At least in a human sense of the word.
The farmer can get across the river with the sheep in one trip. Here's how:
1. The farmer and the sheep get into the boat. 2. They both cross the river together.
Since the boat can hold one person and one sheep, they can make the journey in a single trip. The fewest number of trips required is just one.
If humans were no better than LLMs in the way that this input were processed, there would be no meme, nor would there be a thread about how ridiculous Google's LLM is. Humans would simply accept as fact that glue can be added to pizza to make the cheese stickier, because the words make syntactic sense. Yet here we are.
And yet, of course, now people think it's obvious that inhaling the burnt remains of some plant might not be so healthy.
That's doubtful, since pizza isn't improved upon with the addition of glue, and (again) because the premise that glue can make pizza cheese "stick" is absurd on its face. Humans don't simply add random ingredients to their food for no reason, or because no one taught them to do otherwise. There is process, aesthetic, culture and art behind the way food is designed and prepared. it needs to at least taste good. Glue covered pizza wouldn't taste good.
>Look at smoking, arguably worse then eating some types of glue, yet for a large part of human history this was normal and not even seen as unhealthy.
Again, the relative health benefits of glue or lack thereof is not the reason people don't use glue on pizza, nor is it why people consider the LLM's statement of a joke presented as fact to be absurd or exceptional.
>And yet, of course, now people think it's obvious that inhaling the burnt remains of some plant might not be so healthy.
And yet, there are also plenty of people who don't.
You just keep proving my point. There are layers of complexity and nuance to the human interpretation of all of this that simply don't exist with LLMs. The fact that we're here discussing it at all is evidence that a distinct difference exists between human cognition and LLMs.
I can see that you're deeply invested in the narrative that LLMs are functionally equivalent to humans, a lot of people seem to be. I don't know why. It isn't necessary, even with a maximalist stance on AI. But if you literally believe something as absurd as "humans would accept that glue is acceptable to add to pizza if we were not taught otherwise" and that, therefore, there is nothing wrong with an LLM presenting that as a fact, because humans and LLMs process information in exactly the same way, then I don't know what to tell you. You live in a completely different reality than I do, and I'm not going to waste any more of my time trying to explain color to the blind.
I wonder if there's been a bit of a conflation with the other meme, about sniffing glue, which has also lost much of its context considering that rubber cement and other similar types of glue which contain volatile solvents are also less widely used than they once were.
Some people will trust AI as much as they trust the strong man in power, no matter how obtuse that man is, and one day someone will eventually die or be seriously harmed because of a wrong advice by AI; Google should turn off that nonsense for good before someone is harmed.