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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

A calculator can also outperform a human, and there are many other devices that have outperformed humans for a very long time. Does that mean it is human-level intelligence?

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True, but that's also kind of the point - we have grown computers from adding number (calculator 1960s capability) to being able to beat humans at chess (1997) to beating humans at jeopardy (2013) to breaking the turing test (2020+), LLM's that can write code (and test it themselves!), and even creating art and music.

So IMO if we are saying that "there's no evidence that computers will have human level intelligence" we need to take a step back and define what that means - because if you were sitting in the 1960's and you defined it, a modern LLM may very well have already met that definition.

> to breaking the turing test (2020+)

You mean 1967, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

> However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary.

"Does X look like Y" is always a continum. In test environments, players are judged human with these rates:

* Real humans 66%

* GPT-4: 49.7%

* ELIZA: 22%

* GPT-3.5: 20%

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.20216

(I'm rather surprised by ELIZA beating 3.5, as were the researchers).

Turing's introduction of the test, was a 70% chance of spotting the AI after 5 minutes.

You can't define intelligence by how people in any one point in time would have responded to it. A calculator is AI to people of the 19th century, but not to us. It's only in the passing of time, if something that is thought to be intelligent still seems intelligent long after it is introduced, that we might have a contender.

A moving definition of intelligence isn't particularly useful though if we are trying to establish if something classifies as intelligent or not.

But I think we have at least moved from a state of computers that are less 'intelligent' than a fish, to more 'intelligent' than a dog (assuming by intelligent we mean 'ability to solve problems, and to apply knowledge to novel situations' - i.e. while GPT-4 will make illegal chess moves, it would make less illegal moves than a well-trained dog).

We have moved that quickly from fish to dog, so we need to be careful to not let hubris make us think we are that much more special! Dog-intelligence to human-intelligence is a big leap, but maybe not as much of a leap as fish to dog? Or at least dog to ape and ape to human?

The thing with AI though is that it is being trained to use tools, not to be a tool.

When they can outperform human infants in learning, eg data required to learn and versatility, we can talk business.

Not all world is "big data".

I suggest playing around with gemini's 1 or 2 million context window. You'd be surprised how much you can get from an LLM when you can drop a few textbooks on the topic into the context window before asking it anything.

Mind you, this is also all early gen stuff.

On the flipside, AI's have a super-human ability to consume knowledge that humans can't compete with.

This just seems like putting a human-constraint on AI systems so that we can still classify ourselves as special.

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