> * As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”
Yes, LLMs are more about knowledge than intelligence. AK rather than AI.
Yes, LLMs are more about knowledge than intelligence. AK rather than AI.
Biology has a working definitions of "living organism" that includes a way to calculate likelihood that something is a living organism, but it still is probabilistic.
Understanding is another concept that depends on philosophy of the mind as opposed to concrete physical processes.
Wikipedia even has it's own page with some of the various definitions people use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_knowledge
Then we have implicit/explicit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_and_explicit_knowledg...) where some people assume one of them when they say "knowledge", others refer to the other.
In fact, there is an entire scientific field to understanding what "knowledge" actually is/means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
So yeah, it isn't as simple as looking it up in a dictionary, unfortunately.
to give an example, a quite boring "philosophy question" that's bandied around, usually by children, is "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". the answer is that "sound" is a word without a commonly-accepted, logically-derived meaning, for the reasons given above. so if to you the word sound is something human, then the answer is no, but if to you a sound is not something human, then the answer is yes. there's nothing particularly interesting or complex about the thought experiment, it's just a poorly defined word
Yes...it does. "AI" aka modern flavor LLMs as we understand them today are just doing certain things thats humans can do but orders of magnitude faster. What exactly is impressive about it being able to succinctly sum up any topic under the Sun aside from the speed? It will never create a new genre of music. It will never create a new style of art from the ground up. It lacks the human spark of ingenuity. To even suggest that what it does anything close to human cognition is egregiously insulting.
the opinion you're parroting here completely misses the point of LLMs. their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is. their purpose is to accelerate information retrieval and translation and programming tasks, which they by and large are incredible at. even if they had the capacity to invent artistic movements, which in theory they most certainly do, starting an artistic movement is pretty much intrinsically a human thing, and it requires desire, inclination, trust and a grounding in the real world, such as it is. your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
whether it is "cognition" or not is completely irrelevant to their purpose and use, and its a complete waste of time trying to litigate if it is or not because the word in itself is poorly defined. if you're trying to figure out if j=k but you can't define j or k, and you do know that k isn't a big factor in the usefulness of the system, then what is the point? is it jealousy? fear? I assure you, LLMs are not a threat to the special ingenuity of your mind
this opinion is the equivalent of watching the invention of the pocket calculator and complaining that it can't write calculus equations on a black board
your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.
There are plenty of people/communities online that want it to be exactly that and want to remove the pesky human element from the equation. Dismissing them because it doesn't fit your argument doesn't mean they don't exist.
To Chomsky? He'd have to speak for himself, but I suspect the answer is "yes, obviously, at least to be of interest to me."
Note that I'm not saying LLMs are useless or even that what they do is usefully described as "plagiarism."
But it seems entirely unsurprising to me that Chomsky would be unimpressed and uninterested -- even to the point of dismissiveness, he's pretty much like that -- precisely because they are unrelated to "cognition."
To me this is the usual "it doesn't _really_ understand" claim which people say because they feel like their human exceptionality is threatened.
Though intelligence is possibly even less well defined than knowledge, so it's hard to tell.
I believe intelligence goes beyond that: knowing that such a system is a solution to an observed problem, architecting said system, using the output to solve a problem, analyzing the results, and deciding where to deploy additional systems.
I think both examples above can be done by AI (if not now, then soon)—but only after being prompted carefully by a human. However, a generalized AI that can do all of the above for any problem in the known universe is likely very far off.
We ought to avoid anthropomorphizing LLMs. It is muddle headed.
An LLM doesn't deal with propositions, and it is propositions that are the subjects of truth claims. LLMs produce strings of characters that, when interpreted by a human reader, can look like propositions and result in propositions in the human mind, and it is those propositions that have intentionality and truth value. But what the LLMs produce are not the direct expression of propositional content, only the recombination of a large number of expressions of propositional content authored by many human authors.
People are projecting subjective convention onto the objective. The objective truth about LLMs is far poorer in substance than the conventional readings we give to what LLMs generate. There is a good deal of superstition and magical thinking that surrounds LLMs.