Mind-reading AI can translate brainwaves into written text: Using only a sensor-filled helmet combined with artificial intelligence, a team of scientists has announced they can turn a person’s thou…::A system that records the brain’s electrical activity through the scalp can turn thoughts into words with help from a large language model – but the results are far from perfect
“Big Bacteria” is a much more accurate descriptor of humans than “Artificial Intelligence” is of large language models.
This is the same problem we had with IQ testing, what the test measures is not “intelligence”, but the ability to retain and process information according to a predefined schema. This requires no intelligence at all, as demonstrated by the fact that a sufficiently large statistical model of human writing patterns can pass the SATs.
This seems like circular reasoning. SAT scores don’t measure intelligence because llm can pass it which isn’t intelligent.
Why isn’t the llm intelligent?
Because it can only pass tests that don’t measure intelligence.
You still haven’t answered what intelligence is or what an a.i. would be. Without a definition you just fall into the trap of “A.I. is whatever computers cant do” which has been going on for a while:
Computers can do arithmetic but they can’t do calculus, that requires true intelligence.
Ok computers can do calculus, but they can’t beat someone in chess, that requires true intelligence.
Ok computers can beat us in chess, but they can’t form coherent sentences and ideas, that requires true intelligence.
Ok computers can form coherent sentences but …
It’s all just moving the goal post to try and preserve some exclusively human/organic claim to intelligence.
There is one goalpost that has stayed steady, the turing test, which llm seems to have passed, at least for shorter conversation.
The purpose of the SAT isn’t to measure intelligence, it is to rank students on their ability to answer test questions.
A copy of the answer key could get a perfect score, do you think that means it’s “intelligence” is equivalent to a person with perfect SATs?
For the same reason that the SAT answer key or an instruction manual isn’t, the ability to answer questions is not the foundation of intelligence, nor is it exclusive to intelligent entities.
Computer scientists, neurologists, and philosophers can’t answer that either, or else we’d already have the algorithms we’d need to build human-equivalent AI.
Exactly, you’re just falling into the Turing Trap instead. Just because a company can convince you that it’s program is intelligent doesn’t mean it is, or else chatbots from 10 years ago would qualify.
The Turing Test is just a slightly modified version of a Victorian-era social deduction game. It doesn’t measure intelligence, but the ability to mimic a human conversation. Turing himself acknowledged this: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/turing-test-measures-something-but-not-intelligence-180951702/
I think your mixing up sentience / consciousness with intelligence. What is consciousness doesn’t have a good answer right now and like you said philosophers, computer scientists and neurologist can’t come to a clear answer but most think llms aren’t conscious.
Intelligence on the other hand does have more concrete definitions that at least computer scientists use that usually revolve around the ability to solve diverse problems and answer questions outside of the entities original training set / database. Yes doing an SAT test with the answer key isn’t intelligent because that’s in your “database” and is just a matter of copying over the answers. LLMs don’t do this though, it doesn’t do a lookup of past SAT questions it’s seen and answer it, it uses some process of “reasoning” to do it. If you gave an LLM an SAT question that was not in it’s original training set it would probably still answer it correctly.
That isn’t to say that LLMs are the be all and end all of intelligence, there are different types of intelligence corresponding to the set of problems that intelligence is solving. A plant identification A.I. is intelligent for being able to identify various plants in different scenarios but it completely lacks any emotional, conversational intelligence, etc. The same can be said of a botanist who also may be able to identify plants but may lack some artistic intelligence to depict them. Intelligence comes in many forms.
Different tests can measure different forms of intelligence. The SAT measures a couple like reasoning, rhetoric, scientific etc. The turing test measures conversational intelligence , and the article you showed doesn’t seem to show a quote from him saying that it doesn’t measure intelligence, but turing would probably agree it doesn’t measure some sort of general intelligence, just one facet.
The “reasoning” in LLM is literally statistical probability of which word would follow which word. It has no real concept of what it talks about beyond the pre-built relationship matrices between words and language rules. That’s why LLMs confidently hallucinate obvious bullshit time to time - to them there’s no meaning to either truthful or absolute bonkers text, it’s just words that should probably follow each other.
All inference is just statistical probability. Every answer you give outside of your direct experience is just you infering what might be the answer. Even things we hold as verifiable truth that we haven’t experienced is just a guess that the person who told it to us isn’t lying or has some sort of proof to there statement.
Take some piece of knowledge like “Biden won the 2020 election” me and you would probably agree this is the truth, but we can’t possibly “know” it’s the truth or connect it to some verifiable experience, we never counted every ballot or were at every polling station. We “know” it’s the truth because more people, and more respectable people, told us it was and our brain makes a statistical guess that their answer is right based on their weight. Just like an LLM other people will hallucinate or bullshit and come on the other side of that guess and assert the opposite and even make up stuff to go along with that story.
This in essence is what reasoning is, you weigh the possibilities of either side being correct, and pick the one that has more weight. That’s why science, an epistemological application of reason, is so heavily reliant on statistics…