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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

Or write code. Or write songs. Or create paintings. Or write essays.

The whole comparison is stupid, and inexplicable at LeCun's level of play. AI is not a model of a human brain, or a cat brain, or a parrot brain, or any other kind of brain. It's something else, something that did not exist in any form just a few years ago.

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What is increasingly making sense to me is the description of current AI as an alien intelligence—something potentially powerful but fundamentally different from ours. Viewed that way, LeCun's use of humans—or cats—as the baseline seems misguided. Yes, there are things biological intelligence can do that artificial intelligence cannot, but there are also things AI can do better than us. And the danger might be that, because of their speed, replicability, networkability, and other capabilities that exceed those of biology, AI systems can be intelligent in ways that we have trouble imagining.

Valid point there, for sure. People are so busy arguing over when and whether we'll build something with human-level intelligence, they aren't stopping to ask if something even better is possible.

The flip side is that AI systems can also be stupid in ways we have trouble imagining. Which we are seeing play out with LLMs - while able to make plausible and persuasive sentences - they also confidently make many mistakes that humans are very unlikely to do.

We must at the very least resist trying to compare human with artificial intelligence on general, dimensional measures. It does not make any sense, because the nature of the two are more different than alike.

Animals fly by flapping their wings, hence an airplane is not really flying. It can't even land safely in a tree!

Exactly. It's pointless to argue over whether an aircraft is really capable of flight, when small drones are already capable of outmaneuvering most birds on the birds' own turf.

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