| > hallmarks of intelligence All through the lens of personification. It's important to take a step back and ask, "Where do these hallmarks come from?" The hallmarks of intelligence are literally what is encoded into text. The reason LLMs are so impressive is that they manage to follow those patterns without any explicit direction. > I dare say that LLMs reading comprehension, problem solving and reasoning skills do surpass that of many actual humans. People tend to over-optimize reading comprehension by replacing what they are reading with what they predict to be reading. Every person has a worldview built out of prior knowledge that they use to disambiguate language. It takes effort to suspend one's worldview, and it takes effort to write accurate unambiguous language. An LLM cannot have that problem, because an LLM cannot read. An LLM models text. The most dominant patterns of text are language: either the model aligns with those patterns, or we humans call the result a failure and redirect our efforts. > Anthropomorphizing LLMs is indeed an issue but is separate from a debate on their intelligence. How could that even be possible? The very word, "intelligence" is an anthropomorphization. Ignoring that reality moves the argument into pointless territory. If you try to argue that an anthropomorphized LLM is intelligent, then the answer is, "No shit, Sherlock. People are intelligent!" That doesn't answer any questions about a real LLM. > as these models sprint past goal posts. Either an LLM succeeds at a goal, or it fails. It has no idea what the difference is. The LLM has no concept of success: no category for failure. An LLM has no goals or intentions, and doesn't make a single logical decision. So what is its success coming from? The text being modeled. Without humans authoring that text, there is no model at all! The goals are authored, too. Every subject, every decision, every behavior, and every goal is determined by a human. Without human interaction, the LLM is nothing. Does nothing think? Does an arrow find its target? Of course not. |