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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

> LLMs won't get intelligent.

I think this sentence doesn't mean much unless we have a strict definition of what intelligence means.

Just today ChatGPT helped me solve a DNS issue that I would not have been able to solve on my own in one day, let alone an hour. I'd consider it already more intelligent than myself when it comes to DNS.

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It's seen more DNS content than you and anybody else have seen in their entire lives, and are able to regurgitate what it read because it has far faster memory access than you did.

A dictionary contain knowledge but no intelligence.

And LLMs are the opposite of dictionary, actually. They suck at storing facts. They excel at extracting patterns from noise and learning them. It's not obvious to me that this isn't intelligence; on the contrary, I feel it's very much a core component of it.

Isn't that a dictionary of patterns?

> They excel at extracting patterns from noise and learning them.

You can argue those are facts too.

Yes, I have noticed that a lot of extreme AI cynics have been arguing that any and every example of reasoning or thinking that an LLM displays is just some variant of memorisation.

The biggest evidence that LLMs can’t reason is hallucinations. If it could reason it would have rejected fictional generated output that make no sense.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that LLMs lack (self-)awareness. Because when you point out things that make no sense, they do have some limited ability to produce reasoning about that. But I agree that this lack of awareness is a serious and maybe fundamental deficit.

And how often does it get that wrong too?

It’s more likely it’s just, once again, generating the most probable answer - and if you shake the magic 8 ball enough you will get the answer you were expecting.

Yeah, but the thing is, this seems exactly what people are doing too, at the boundary of conscious and unconscious, with the "inner voice" being most directly comparable to LLMs. It too generates language that feels like best completion, regardless of whether the output is logically correct or not.

Wouldn't that be evidence at most that its reasoning was flawed, or could contain errors?

> The biggest evidence that LLMs can’t reason is hallucinations.

If I asked you a question and you had to respond with a stream of consciousness reply, no time to reflect on the question and think about your reply, how inaccurate would your response be? The "hallucinations" aren't a problem with the LLM per se, but how we use them. Papers have shown that feeding the output back into the input, as happens when humans iterate on their own initial thoughts, helps tremendously with accuracy.

In comparing to human minds, LLMs are better understood as the "inner voice" part, not the mind. From that perspective, it's eerie how similar the two are in success and failure modes alike.

Yes, I'm saying here that peoples' inner voices are hallucinating in very similar fashion; "rejecting fictional generated output that makes no sense" is a process that's consciously observable and involves looping the inner voice on itself.

Find me a dictionary that will turn to the correct page when I say or type "what's a word that means (thing)" and yes, I'd consider it intelligent.

But still, you don't have to agree with me about what intelligence means. But it is important in these discussions to understand that not every participant shares the same definition of the term intelligence.

That's just more advanced indexing.

intelligence to me has to be based off initiative. In that sense, a dog or a cat have more intelligence than GPT.

I actually very much look forward silicon (or other non-biotic material) attaining intelligence, I consider that the only way that Earth civilization can colonize space. But this aint it.

“… unless we have a strict definition of what intelligence means.”

There were some Greek guys working on that exact problem a few (thousand) years ago.

> Just today ChatGPT helped me solve a DNS issue that I would not have been able to solve on my own in one day, let alone an hour. I'd consider it already more intelligent than myself when it comes to DNS.

Would you consider a search engine, or a book, to be as intelligent?

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