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Comment by utopiah | Hacker News Reader

> a flurry of this sort of stuff as the AIs get smart enough to find them.

I really think this characterization is misleading. It's not "getting smart", only more tailored toward a specific usage, better curated dataset, better harness, better prompts, better labeling of results, documentation of failures and success, etc.

The outcome is (hopefully) overall better but this anthropomorphized wording makes it sound like AI itself is somehow changing or evolving. No, both academia doing fundamental research, industry making it available commercially, and finally security researchers making the entire tooling and process packaged as a service are actively shaping it to make it better. There is no "it".

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Do you have a definition of "smart" such that there is something an AI could do to prove itself intelligent?

Or are you just defining "fast" as something only horses can do, and considering that a useful insight about cars?

A future AI may be intelligent, but LLMs are clearly not. They have no agency, no ability to reason, and no world model. The most effective way to use them is to treat them as next token prediction machines, because that’s what they are.

edit: downvotes but no rebuttals. feel free to show me where the agency, reasoning from first principles, world model etc exists. or you can ask an llm and they'll tell you they don't have those.

Long-term memory, for one. (reliving your entire life every time you do an action isn't memory). Creativity in new areas without training. Children at school are capable of "discovering" math solutions/methods that are known to others but hasn't been taught to them.

There's nothing intelligent about a math processor, even if it's automated.

> Long-term memory, for one.

Do you consider the protagonist of "Memento" to lack intelligence, then?

> Children at school are capable of "discovering" math solutions/methods that are known to others but hasn't been taught to them.

LLMs have already done that one: A chatbot’s result for the 80-year-old “unit distance” conjecture is the first AI proof that would likely be published in math’s top journal if humans had done it alone

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...

> Creativity in new areas without training.

To my knowledge, not something that has ever been done by humans, but again, it depends entirely on how you actually define the goal posts.

> There's nothing intelligent about a math processor, even if it's automated.

There's nothing intelligent about a bag of cells, but here we are.

My point was more about agency and anthropomorphization than the definition of intelligence, which is why I didn't just quote "smart" but rather "getting smart".

Yes, of course. I’m definitely anthropomorphizing as a shorthand. I’m the first one to say that these models are just a lot of matrix math.

I think you are giving the word "smart" a meaning or implication that it no longer has or is used with. It is common to say Google Search or Siri got smarter/better or dumber/worse, so I don't see saying LLMs getting smarter is any different.

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