I thought they were stoichastic parrots that couldn't do anything outside their training data. Now they might do anything? I don't know what to believe, let me ask ChatGPT and have it tell me what to think!
I swear to God we could have AGI+robotics capable of doing anything a human can do (but better) and we'll still - as a species - have multi-hour podcasts pondering and mostly concluding "yea, impressive, but they're not really intelligent. That's not what intelligence actually is."
However, when people talk like this, it does make one wonder if the opposite isn't true. No AI has done more than what an mp3 player does, but apparently there are people who hear an mp3 player say "Hello neighbor!" and actually believe that it greeted them.
Otherwise I do not know what definition of intelligence you are using. For me I just use wiki's: "Intelligence can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context."
Nothing in that definition disallows a system from being "pure mechanism" and also being intelligent. An mp3 player isn't intelligent because - unlike AI - it isn't taking in information to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
An mp3 player that learns my preferences over time and knows exactly when to say hi and how based on contextual cues is displaying intelligence. But I would be mistaken for thinking that it doing so means it is also conscious.
Well it's no crime to be so handicapped, but if it were me, that would not be something I went around advertizing.
Or you're not so challenged. You did know how to parse that perfectly common phrase, because you are not in fact a moron. Ok, then that means you are disingenuous instead, attempting to make a point that you know doesn't exist.
I mean I'm not claiming either one, you can choose.
Perhaps you should ask ChatGPT which one you should claim to be, hapless innocent idiot, or formidable intellect ass.
The linked article doesn't give us the full transcript of what transpired, so we can't pour over it and analyze what it did, but it went in and messed about with grub, which, used to be, you'd have a cavalier junior sysadmin would go in and do. Now we can have an LLM go do that at the cost of billions of dollars. but the thing of it is, it didn't go in and just start doing random things, like rm -rf / , or composing a poem, or getting stuck in vi. it tried (but failed) to do something specific, beyond what the human driving it asked it to do, but with something resembling intention.
whether LLMs can reason depends on your definition of reason, but intention is a new one.