Even your original question was kind of ridiculous. "Ignoring everything LLMs aren't designed to do, what the difference between an LLM and a general intelligence?"

I mean, if we follow that logic...Give me a math equation that proves my calculator isn't a general intelligence.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee -3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Calculators don’t do anything with equations. They perform logical operations via substitution in order to determine the numerical value of terms.

But if you really want to go by that logic I agree: if you can represent a real world situation in terms of mathematical terms to be calculated into a final value, then a calculator is competent to navigate that situation.

I agree with that the term “general intelligence” is poorly-defined. My reason for posing a precise challenge is to put a spotlight on this fact.

We want to categorize LLMs as other than us, via this term “general intelligence”, because it is less terrifying than acknowledging that there’s a new intelligence operating next to us. That we have new neighbors, and that we are not keeping up with them.

My overall goal is to foster respect for the severity of our situation, by nullifying this “oh don’t worry it’s not real artificial intelligence”.

As for the calculator-vs-LLM question, I’d say LLMs are more likely to post a threat to human hegemony, because it is easier to reduce the world to a textual narrative than it is to reduce it to a mathematical term to be calculated.

And I agree. For all our sake, we must stop using “yeah but is it a GeNeRaL InTeLliGeNcE” as our excuse for pretending the singularity isn’t happening.

[–] Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I just...you seem to have a fair grasp of mathematics and logic (or you copied a portion of your reply from some other source that does) but you either don't have a grasp of how LLMs work and are built or you have an extremely nieve view consciousness or I'm missing some prior assumption you used in coming to the conclusion that LLMs are anywhere near the level you seem to be implying instead of statistical models. The input you provide to an LLM does not alter the underlying weights of the nodes in the network unless it is kept in training mode. When that happens, they quickly break down, and all the output becomes garbage because they have no reality checking mechanism, and they don't have context in the way people or even animals we consider intelligent.

[–] Jax@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago

Sort of like a human who isn't allowed to sleep, in my opinion.

They may have a solid grasp on Mathematics, but they've got a poor grasp on Biology.

Human beings can push themselves well beyond the limits of needing to sleep, this is why sleep deprivation happens. It is not simply a mechanical matter of "there's only so much time in the day".

Cocaine exists.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Okay that's a good point. LLMs, without retraining, are limited in the overall amount of complexity they can successfully navigate.

Sort of like a human who isn't allowed to sleep, in my opinion. A human may be capable of designing an airplane, but not if the human never sleeps, because the complexity is beyond what a human can do in a single day without becoming exhausted and producing errors.

Do you believe that a series of LLMs, with each LLM being trained on the previous LLM's training data plus the "input/output completions" that the previous iteration performed, would be a general intelligence?

If I sound naive it is because I am trying to apply Occam's Razor to my own thinking, and minimize the conversation to the absolute minimum necessary set of involvements to move it forward. I'll consider anything you ask me to, but so far I haven't seen a reason to involve consciousness in questions of general intelligence. Do you think they are linked?

By the way, if you have a better definition of "general intelligence" than whatever definition was implied by my original challenge, I'm all ears.

[–] Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's more than being limited in the overall complexity. The locked node weights mean that the LLM is fully deterministic...that is, it has no will or goals, no opinion, no sense of self/sense of the environment/sense of the separation between self/environment. It has no comprehension.

Iterative training cycles are already used with LLMs and don't solve any of those issues.

From the standpoint of psychology, there's not a wholly agreed upon definition for 'intelligence' but most working definitions require the ability to learn from experience, the ability to recognize problems and to generalize and adapt that experience to solve the problem.

Theoretically, if an LLM had "intelligence," you could ask it about a problem that was completely dereferenced in the training data. An intelligent LLM would be able to comprehend that problem, generalize it to a level that it could relate to some previous experience, then use details about that prior experience to come up with potential solutions to the new problem. LLMs can't achieve any of those things individually, never mind all together. If someone pulled that off, it wouldn't convince me their model was worth the level of concern you articulated earlier, but it would get my attention and would be something I'd watch pretty closely.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 0 points 7 months ago

So you’re assuming determinism is incompatible with consciousness now? Comprehension? I might be “naive about the nature of consciousness” but you’re gullible about it if you think you know those things.

But at least you’ve made a definite claim now about a thing which an LLM cannot do, which is:

Theoretically, if an LLM had "intelligence," you could ask it about a problem that was completely dereferenced in the training data.

That brings me back to the original challenge: can you articulate such a problem? We can experiment with ChatGPT and see how it handles it.