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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

I look at it the complete opposite way: humans are defining intelligence upwards to make sure they can perceive themselves better than a computer.

It's clear that humans consider humans as intelligent. Is a monkey intelligent? A dolphin? A crow? An ant?

So I ask you, what is the lowest form of intelligence to you?

(I'm also a huge David Lynch fan by the way :D)

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Intelligence has been a poorly defined moving goal post for as long as AI research has been around.

Originally they thought: chess takes intelligence, so if computers can play chess, they must be intelligent. Eventually they could, and later even better than humans, but it's a very narrow aspect of intelligence.

Struggling to define what we mean by intelligence has always been part of AI research. Except when researchers stopped worrying about intelligence and started focusing on more well-defined tasks, like chess, translation, image recognition, driving, etc.

I don't know if we'll ever reach AGI, but on the way we'll discover a lot more about what we mean by intelligence.

If you look at my comment history you will see that I don't think LLMs are nearly as intelligent as rats or pigeons. Rats and pigeons have an intuitive understanding of quantity and LLMs do not.

I don't know what "the lowest form of intelligence" is, nobody has a clue what cognition means in lampreys and hagfish.

Im not sure what that gets you. I think most people would suggest that it appears to be a sliding scale. Humans, dolphins / crows, ants, etc. What does that get us?

Well, is an LLM more intelligent than an ant?

I would say yes. But is it more intelligent than an ant hill?

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