What I do notice however is that LLMs are becoming capable of doing an increasing part of the intellectual work I can do, and usually a lot faster.
Just today I presented an agent framework that can take an informal incident statement and propose infrastructure changes to fix it, all evidence backed. This did nothing I could not to, but it did all 5 test cases in 6 - 12 minutes each. I would have found all of the monitoring indications it did, but it would have taken me a day per test case. The LLM also included sass to silly tickets. ("This is not even worth spending monitoring resources on. It's obviously a configuration problem.")
That's how this is reading to me as well. It's just fast at slogging through a certain level of "simple" transformations.
[0] https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis#gwern-difference--effic...
Exactly. The "most likely next" series of tokens, for example, when given the first half of a correct mathematical proof, is the correct rest of the proof. I have never seen anyone define "most likely next token" in such a way that this isn't true.
There is clearly intelligence there. We have no way to recognise intelligence other than the appearance of intelligence and this very clearly displays that.
It's also quite clearly different to human intelligence in some notable ways, but not in any that preclude describing it as intelligent. At least for normal non-pedantic definitions of the word.
But there's no way the thinking times would have been that short, of course.
It's clearly much more than that.
We have no way to recognise intelligence other than the appearance of intelligence and this very clearly displays that.
The point of those cognitive science experiments is that they apply to any animal with a brain and plausibly show a real shared concept of "intelligence" that isn't limited to humans. According to this concept, orcas might be smarter than humans, despite their physiological inability to make tools. It's not a "normal, nonpedantic definition" of intelligence because such a definition would be scientifically meaningless.
Indeed, AI's fundamental sin, going back to Alan Turing, is embracing a definition of intelligence that applies to civilized humans, but not to hunter-gatherers, let alone apes, corvids, and cetaceans. Frustratingly, our modern society has two concepts of intelligence:
- an intuitive, social sense of "how smart is this guy?", which is well-understood and, being highly correlated with IQ, a totally pseudoscientific artifact of human psychology
- the poorly-understood scientific concept I mentioned earlier
If AI researchers cared about scientific thinking, they would be intensely focused on the brains of bees. Insteac they love money and sci-fi but have pure contempt for science, even Demis Hassabis. This is why AI researchers have yet to build a robot that navigates real-world 3D space as intelligently as a cockroach. I don't think any of our grandchildren will live to see a computer smarter than a mouse. (It seems like Fable still struggles with small-number arithmetic. Rodents don't.)
Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described. The AI industrialists stopped caring 6 years ago once they realized LLMs seem to have been the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level.
There are plenty of pioneering scientists who are either returning to actual AI research (Yann Lecun, Ilya, etc), and plenty who never left (Richard Sutton) who are doing exactly what you are talking about.
That is not true. Alan Turing did not view things that way, his test would say that a dog has zero intelligence. Neither did any of the MIT Lispers. And neither do Lecun or Sutskever or Sutton! They are all focused on human intelligence. None of them are even slightly concerned about an AI which is intelligent before it learns any language.
> the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level
This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM.
??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvibIstOn_E his arguemtn here is clearly built around using some sort of sensory data to build a model of the world like humans (animals) do. also you clearly decline to mention Lecun who has made this point ad-infinitum
> This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM.
i personally find it very strange that non-deep learning AI approaches which essentially boiled down to a giant bundle of if statements, or some very simple statistical modeling were called AI in the first place.
A second corollary is that rational consciousness and thought is less likely to be contained in language than previously thought, because if language is so simple that a machine can process it, it can't contain consciousness.
Da hole raisin y nat-lang be v. hard is dat i kan rite lik dis an it be cool 4 native engrish speekrs 2 unerstand. LLMs are of course fine with this sentence in exactly the way that Zork's engine couldn't be.
example For, semi-randomise I word order can this like, Yoda worse than, and be understood.
> is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.
We had to invent Transformers to be able to do that with reliability anything close to being worth caring about. Transformers have to learn from examples, not be pre-programmed.