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by lukev 64 days ago
"intelligence" is not well defined. LLMs are throwing this into high relief with how "spiky" their capability curve is. Yes, they can solve some crazy hard problems with enough compute and thinking tokens. Yes, they also fall down in the dumbest ways without an ability to self-correct... despite how "smart" they are, human supervision remains absolutely critical for any system of importance.

But I don't think the takeaway is "humans are intelligent and LLMs are not", it's that our vocabulary for talking about the intersection of language, cognition and compute is not up for the task.

1 comments

Intelligence was supposedly well defined, but folks kept getting their definitions wrecked by modern LLMs so we had to move the goal posts.

No true Scottsman fallacy.

What was the “well defined” definition? I’m not aware of any other than “this particular thing a human can do that I expect would be difficult for a computer.”