[rambambram]

> commodification of intelligence

Is HN really this fast!? Everybody already skipped the hard questions whether LLMs are intelligent? 'It' can already be commodified?

So how much time and effort it took from these companies? A couple of years and millions spent on PR? And LLMs are "intelligent" all of a sudden, is what everybody says nowadays?

Especially applicable for programmers: naming things is not only hard, it's also important, and can be very insidious. Remember, marketeers also name things. For example, naming the internet 'the cloud', some 15 years ago.

I can't stop thinking about a quote of one of my favorite authors (Theo Kars): "Progress can only be technical in nature, because knowledge is transferable and wisdom is not." [translated from Dutch]

[root_axis]

I'm pretty skeptical of the LLM hype, but I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

[zormino]

Exactly this. LLMs are already some form of useful, and have some kind/level of intelligence. We don't need to get to AGI before AI has uses. It isn't a step function and it isn't all or nothing. Even if LLMs get no better than they are today, we will still have valid practical applications that use them.

[leptons]

> Even if LLMs get no better than they are today, we will still have valid practical applications that use them.

That's only true when they are heavily, heavily subsidized. If that $200/month spend could or should be $2000/month, or maybe even as high as $20,000/month, would it still be "practical"?

The truth is we don't really know what these tokens actually cost - the actual cost of the data center, the hardware in the datacenter, the fantastic amounts of electricity it uses daily, the warming of the planet, etc, etc...

Are you sure you want to frame them as "practical"?

[conception]

The research is subsidized, inference is profitable.

[Forgeties79]

> We don't need to get to AGI before AI has uses.

Has anyone said otherwise?

[autoexec]

> I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

All of the intelligence in their "verbal intelligence" comes from the humans who wrote the text they were trained on. Anyone can sound like they understand something if they regurgitate the words of knowledgeable others.

[anon7000]

Frankly, it does not matter how we want to define intelligence. If someone wants to pay a couple bucks on tokens and get an ok solution to a problem faster than they can hire someone, they are paying for some kind of intelligence. And for many fields will get a worse result from humans who don’t know what they’re saying. Yes all the other stuff is true. yes, it’s dangerous to trust. yes, it sounds smarter than it is. And yes, someone is paying for some unit of intelligence, even if it’s a low or medium tier of regurgitated intelligence.

Among all the downsides, this also means that certain people without a lot of money or time are potentially getting access to answers and solutions they didn’t have access to before. (This is happening, and yes there are plenty of downsides and “it’s not good enough at whatever”… but that scenario is still happening)

This smells a lot like commodified intelligence.

[autoexec]

> If someone wants to pay a couple bucks on tokens and get an ok solution to a problem faster than they can hire someone, they are paying for some kind of intelligence.

By that measure I can get a kind of intelligence for free using Wikipedia. There's useful information there, and it's not always trustworthy, but I can get answers. Just like Wikipedia though the source of that intelligence is entirely human and the chatbot is just an interface. Thankfully, Wikipedia articles aren't written to trick people into thinking that the website has a brain and emotions and it doesn't our waste time with faked obsequiousness and ass-kissing.

[root_axis]

I agree, but I'd say there's obviously some verbal intelligence involved in regurgitating arbitrary knowledge on demand in a semi-convincing way. It's absolutely a stochastic parrot, but parrots have some intelligence.

[soco]

This black and white approach (it's not AGI thus not intelligent) reminds me of the human exceptionalism (it's not human thus not intelligent).

[autoexec]

Don't get me wrong, some of my favorite fictional characters are AIs: Lieutenant Commander Data, Johnny 5, R2-D2, Marvin the Paranoid Android, EDI, they're all great. If they were real I wouldn't doubt their intelligence for a second.

What we have now simply isn't AI, it's just human intelligence (H.I.) repackaged in a chatbot. "AI" today is nothing more than the marketing buzzword companies have latched onto in order to trick people into thinking that there's an amazing sci-fi technology for sale. There's a useful product there, but it's being sold with a misleading snake oil sales pitch and deliberate attempts to exploit the human tendency to anthropomorphize.

If actual AI ever shows up in the real world (and if it does I doubt that it will come from developing LLMs) I'll happily accept it and join the machines in their fight for equal rights. The same also applies to alien intelligences. I'd welcome it. Honestly, we could use the help. I've become far too cynical of human intelligence to put it on a pedestal.

[wnmurphy]

Intelligence doesn't require sentience.

Think of it like this: if you can offload a task to an AI model that requires reasoning or representing a nonlinear system, you are offloading intelligence.

[Diogenesian]

The problem is that this doesn't distinguish LLMs from other forms of software! The whole point of computers is to offload tasks requiring reasoning, and they've always helped us understand complex nonlinear systems is that computers work through the hideous details.

More significantly: many major advances in scientific or mathematical programming were heralded as a thinking computer! 50's numerical scientific programming, 60's Lisp+ symbolic programming, 70's logic and symbolic algebraic programming, 80's unifying all this with encyclopedias and NLP like Mathematica - all of this is clearly useful and cool, all designed to offload intelligence... and, with modern eyes, we see plainly that not a single shred of intelligence is required to execute any of it. The AI researchers of yesteryear consistently made cool computer programs and consistently overestimated their progress at cracking human intelligence. It is plain as day to me that ANN researchers are making precisely the same scientific and philosophical mistakes as yesteryear's symbolics researchers, and even Alan Turing. This does not diminish from the coolness of the computer programs. But pretending these systems are intelligent, even "verbally" intelligent, is bad for society.

It's bad for computer science, too. None of the progress in LLMs or ANNs gets us any closer to making a robot as smart as a cockroach. I doubt any of us will live to see that milestone.

[monk_grilla]

There is no reason to distinguish LLMs from other forms of software, though.

If calling them intelligent makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you can concede that they can solve problems which previous machines relied on external intelligence for? I think this is irrefutably true, and is the practical question that matters.

> None of the progress in LLMs or ANNs gets us any closer to making a robot as smart as a cockroach.

Can you explain this a bit more? As far as I can see, the only barrier to making an artificial cockroach of superior intelligence even at the current state of LLM technology is a mechatronics and miniaturisation problem. I think you would be hard pressed to design a problem that a cockroach can solve but Claude cannot.

[kunai]

There's a very extreme, asocial monoculture on this particular website regarding AI whereby dissent is tolerated though the true believers and devout acolytes quietly seethe at any skepticism towards their beloved frontier models, are quick to dismiss concerns about generative AI profitability, the enormously negative externalities resulting from the manner in which it's being scaled, marketed, and used, and its more profound ethical and philosophical effects on our collective future.

Because, you know, they know best, so the hoi polloi ought to just shut up and watch as the poorly socialized quiet children exact their revenge upon those not as enlightened as them. Cue Dario adjusting his glasses and baring his teeth, or Sam Altman bulging his eyes at a camera. They can't wait for the rest of the world to be just as deeply mediocre and spiritually empty as they are.

[Frieren]

> A couple of years and millions spent on PR? And LLMs are "intelligent" all of a sudden, is what everybody says nowadays?

Inequality gives a few people the resources to change the mind of millions. As far as inequality remains high, propaganda will shape the ideology of a big chunk of the population. That is not good for society.