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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

The Border Collie breed of sheepdogs are often called intelligent, I have never once heard of a human intelligence that insulted by this terminology.

Should we ever construct an AI capable of feeling insulted, I would by default assume the analogy holds, unless they tell me otherwise.

As for the first point: LLMs aren't the only AI in development, and the open letter is "Can we stop and think for a bit? We don't know which box is Pandora's."

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LLMs are not AI - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. LLM is just a hammer, a guitar, or a computer - you push some parameters into it, and it returns a result. Without input it does nothing.

They're an intelligence made by artisans, they're an AI.

"Intent" has nothing much to do with it.

> Without input it does nothing.

And we've been debating if that's also true for humans for as far back as we have written records of humans debating philosophy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa

Bacteria are not intelligent - they have no intent to live, learn, or evolve. However, given enough time, resources, and the right stimuli, bacteria have nonetheless evolved to create us, humans, with intents to live, learn, and evolve. It is trivial to hook up an LLM to its own outputs or that of another LLM. People messing around with LLMs on Twitter are casually playing with rudimentary approaches to add goal-directed behavior to them. In the end, does it matter whether or not it actually has intent, if we decide to make it act as if it does anyway?

Consciousness and qualia aren't necessities for intelligence.

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