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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty skeptical of the LLM hype, but I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

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Exactly this. LLMs are already some form of useful, and have some kind/level of intelligence. We don't need to get to AGI before AI has uses. It isn't a step function and it isn't all or nothing. Even if LLMs get no better than they are today, we will still have valid practical applications that use them.

> We don't need to get to AGI before AI has uses.

Has anyone said otherwise?

> Even if LLMs get no better than they are today, we will still have valid practical applications that use them.

That's only true when they are heavily, heavily subsidized. If that $200/month spend could or should be $2000/month, or maybe even as high as $20,000/month, would it still be "practical"?

The truth is we don't really know what these tokens actually cost - the actual cost of the data center, the hardware in the datacenter, the fantastic amounts of electricity it uses daily, the warming of the planet, etc, etc...

Are you sure you want to frame them as "practical"?

The research is subsidized, inference is profitable.

> I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

All of the intelligence in their "verbal intelligence" comes from the humans who wrote the text they were trained on. Anyone can sound like they understand something if they regurgitate the words of knowledgeable others.

I agree, but I'd say there's obviously some verbal intelligence involved in regurgitating arbitrary knowledge on demand in a semi-convincing way. It's absolutely a stochastic parrot, but parrots have some intelligence.

This black and white approach (it's not AGI thus not intelligent) reminds me of the human exceptionalism (it's not human thus not intelligent).

Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite fictional characters are AIs: Lieutenant Commander Data, Johnny 5, R2-D2, Marvin the Paranoid Android, EDI, they're all great. If they were real I wouldn't doubt their intelligence for a second.

What we have now simply isn't AI, it's just human intelligence (H.I.) repackaged in a chatbot. "AI" today is nothing more than the marketing buzzword companies have latched onto in order to trick people into thinking that there's an amazing sci-fi technology for sale. There's a useful product there, but it's being sold with a misleading snake oil sales pitch and deliberate attempts to exploit the human tendency to anthropomorphize.

If actual AI ever shows up in the real world (and if it does I doubt that it will come from developing LLMs) I'll happily accept it and join the machines in their fight for equal rights. The same also applies to alien intelligences. I'd welcome it. Honestly, we could use the help. I've become far too cynical of human intelligence to put it on a pedestal.

Frankly, it does not matter how we want to define intelligence. If someone wants to pay a couple bucks on tokens and get an ok solution to a problem faster than they can hire someone, they are paying for some kind of intelligence. And for many fields will get a worse result from humans who don’t know what they’re saying. Yes all the other stuff is true. yes, it’s dangerous to trust. yes, it sounds smarter than it is. And yes, someone is paying for some unit of intelligence, even if it’s a low or medium tier of regurgitated intelligence.

Among all the downsides, this also means that certain people without a lot of money or time are potentially getting access to answers and solutions they didn’t have access to before. (This is happening, and yes there are plenty of downsides and “it’s not good enough at whatever”… but that scenario is still happening)

This smells a lot like commodified intelligence.

> If someone wants to pay a couple bucks on tokens and get an ok solution to a problem faster than they can hire someone, they are paying for some kind of intelligence.

By that measure I can get a kind of intelligence for free using Wikipedia. There's useful information there, and it's not always trustworthy, but I can get answers. Just like Wikipedia though the source of that intelligence is entirely human and the chatbot is just an interface. Thankfully, Wikipedia articles aren't written to trick people into thinking that the website has a brain and emotions and it doesn't our waste time with faked obsequiousness and ass-kissing.

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