[alganet]

What if I said that the ability to move the goalpost is the real trick?

Machines started to hold up casual conversation well, so we came up with more clever examples of how to make it hallucinate, which made it look dumb again. We're surprisingly good and fast at it.

You're trying to cap that to a decade, or a specific measure. It serves no other purpose than to force one to make a prediction mistake, which is irrelevant to the intelligence discussion.

[falcor84]

I think I understand what you're saying, but disagree with the implication. If anything, I'm actually impressed by how the development of AI seems to me be making it more and more difficult for us to move the goalpoasts.

There obviously still are many opportunities for us to make fun of the capability of GenAI, but it's getting harder to come up with the "clever" (as you said) prompt. They mostly don't add supernumerary fingers any more, and generally don't make silly arithmetic mistakes on a single prompt. We need to look for more complex and longer-time-horizon tasks to make them fail, and in many situations, the tasks are as likely to trip up a human as they would an AI.

Indeed your comment reminded me of Plato's Dialogues, which mostly involve Socrates intentionally trying to trip up his conversation partner in a contradiction. Reading these didn't ever make me feel that Socrates's partner is not intelligent or really has a deep underlying issue in their mental model, but rather that Socrates (at least as written up by Plato) is very clever and good at rhetoric. Same in regards to AI - I don't see our ability to make them fail as illustrating a lack of intelligence, just that in some ways we are more intelligent or have more relevant experience.

And if you're concerned about making a prediction and all you can fall back of on is a "I know it when I see it" argument, then to me that is as strong a signal as can be that there's no hard line separating between artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

[alganet]

I can move the goalpost without relying on hallucinations or the ability to make fancy rethoric. Just make it about energy consumption, and the whole thing looks dumb again.

Humans can do these amazing things (like learning multiple languages) on a very tight energy budget. LLMs need millions of hours of training to deliver subpar results. If you consider the amount of resources poured into it, it's not that impressive.

If someone needs a measure and a prediction, let's make it then. LLMs will not surpass humans, given both are provided with the same energy budget, in a century. That means I am confident that, given the same energy budget as a human, it will take more than 100 years of development (I think it's more, but I'm being safe) to come up with something that can be trained to fool someone in a conversation.

Can you understand the energy argument from the intelligence perspective? This thing is big, dumb and wasteful. It just have more time (by cheating) to cover its bases. It can do some tricks and fool some people, but it's a whole different thing, and it is reasonable to not call it intelligent.