How is that any different to how our brains work?
> The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not.
Philosophically speaking, that’s also true of human intelligence. For example, the only evidence I have for your intelligence is what I ascribe from the text you’ve written.
> A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think.
Are they? Humans can’t actually agree on whether cats are sentient. And often pet owners will be accused of anthropomorphising cats when describing intelligent behaviour in cats.
> Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?
That’s the question that needs researching.
> If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world?
If it were trained on dolphin behaviour, then yes. Much like humans.
The difference here is that models don’t persist context in the same way humans do so the weights have to be hardcoded in a way that biological neurones are not.
> If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).
Evolution is an entirely different subject to intelligence. They’re not related in any way at all.
Plus humans have actually created new species of plants and animals. So it’s not like we can’t artificially put our thumb on the scale there either
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I should add, I don’t actually think LLMs are sentient. I don’t even know if I’d call them “intelligent” (in the sense of what we describe in conversations such as this). But we also don’t know what intelligence is. Which is why we need to research this problem further.