Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by slyall 1176 days ago
"The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

1 comments

Better that than the opposite effect, to assume that because a system solves a single problem very well, it is intelligent.

Is Stockfish intelligent?

Is a system with A* pathfinding intelligent?

I would define intelligence as the ability to solve a wide variety of novel problems. A system built to be excellent at a single task may be better than humans at that task but still lack "intelligence".

We still don't know what that even is exactly, but historically people consistently underestimate how difficult it is.

Not even knowing how to approach it, researchers work on solving single specialized problems instead and make little progress on whatever "intelligence" is.

(If you'd prefer a different definition of intelligence under which Stockfish and GPT are intelligent, then what would you call the ability to solve a wide variety of novel problems? Feel free to substitute that word for "intelligence" above if you'd like to understand what I'm saying.)

> Is Stockfish intelligent?

> Is a system with A pathfinding intelligent?*

I'm not sure if we should get stuck on definitions of intelligence.

The fact is that these tools are useful, as are the currently existing AI's. The latter can also pass for humans, in many ways, while the algorithms you mentioned can only pass for humans in very narrow domains. Both can exceed human performance in some ways.

Eventually, AI's may be indistinguishable from human or convince humans that they should be treated differently from "mere" programs and algorithms, and at that point we will have entered a new era, call it what you will.

We'll have to "get stuck on" definitions of intelligence if we want to talk precisely about what LLMs are capable of.
Not necessarily, as we can just evaluate them on their performance as we give them ever greater challenges.

To do this we do not need to consider whether they're intelligent at all.