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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid — and not just as a kid, this was still the case 10 years ago — summarising text was considered "AI-complete" (also known as "AI-hard").

In fact, at time of writing, "natural language understanding" is still on the Wikipedia page for AI-complete.

> Intelligence has yet to be accurately defined --- and there is no reason to believe it is a statistical function

Other than the work of Rev. Bayes, Prof. Schrödinger. Plus, now I think about it, saying "randomness can't lead to intelligence" is the talking point for all the people who insist Darwin is wrong and there has to be an intelligent designer.

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What LLMs do and what Evolution does are not the same thing.

Evolution is a process where small changes over a long time create new, more complex organisms. LLMs are not that. LLMs are not evolving themselves, giving themselves new abilities. Just adding more variables to a long list of variables is not the same thing.

saying "randomness can't lead to intelligence" is the talking point

Given enough time, a monkey randomly typing on a keyboard could hypothetically produce Shakespeare.

But talking points aside, this does not make the monkey more "intelligent" nor does it mean that "randomness" is a practical methodology for achieving specific results on a human timescale.

Particularly when the desired result is as complex and poorly understood as "intelligence".

I'm describing evolution itself as the intelligence here, not the monkey. And the million typewriters taking ages is why Creationists argue it can't work (having not understood half of it).

> But talking points aside, this does not make the monkey more "intelligent" nor does it mean that "randomness" is a practical methodology for achieving specific results on a human timescale.

Not by itself. Evolution is more than just random, it's a specific filter on top of randomness, just like all the other things. And computers roll the dice very quickly compared to reproduction, which is why neither you nor any other human can win a chess game against the best computer any more — it did it on a human timescale.

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