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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Wisdom vs knowledge, where the word "knowledge" is doing a lot of work. LLMs don't "know" anything, they predict the next token that has the aesthetics of a response the prompter wants.

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I suspect a lot of people but especially nerdy folks might mix up knowledge and intelligence, because they've been told "you know so much stuff, you are very smart!"

And so when they interact with a bot that knows everything, they associate it with smart.

Plus we anthropomorphise a lot.

Is Wikipedia "smart"?

What is the definition of intelligence?

Ability to create an internal model of the world and run simulations/predictions on it in order to optimize the actions that lead to a goal. Bigger, more detailed models and more accurate prediction power are more intelligent.

How do you know if something is creating an internal model of the world?

Look at the physical implementation of how it computes.

So you are making the determination based on the method, not on the outcome.

Did I ever promise otherwise? Intelligence is inherently computational, and needs a physical substrate. You can understand it both by interacting with the black box and opening up the box.

Definitely not _only_ knowledge.

Right, so a dictionary isn't intelligent. Is a dog intelligent?

It doesn't seem obvious to me that predicting a token that is the answer to a question someone asked would require anything less than coming up with that answer via another method.

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