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Comment by DiogenesKynikos | Hacker News Reader

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> That view of humans - and LLMs - ignores the fact that when you combine large numbers of simple building blocks, you can get completely novel behavior.

I can bang smooth rocks to get sharper rocks; that doesn't make sharper rocks more intelligent. Makes them sharper, though.

Which is to say, novel behavior != intelligence.

Yes, that seems to hold for rocks. But that doesn’t shut down the original post’s premise, unless you hold the answer to what can and cannot be banged together to create emergent intelligence.

Extraordinary assumptions (i.e., AI is conscious) require extraordinary proof. If I told you my bag of words was sentient, I assume you'd need more proof than just my word.

The fact that LLMs talk intelligently is the extraordinary proof. It would be difficult for me to prove that you're not an LLM, or for you to prove that I'm not an LLM. That's how good they are.

Talking intelligently isn't a high bar. Eliza could talk intelligently. It's necessary but insufficient.

Talking intelligently about arbitrary subjects is an incredibly high bar. Eliza could not do anything even remotely approaching that, and this would have been considered black magic by the general public prior to 2022.

It's incredible how quickly the bar has been raised here.

We're not talking about sharp rocks.

We're talking about LLMs that you can talk to, and which for the most part respond more intelligently than perhaps 90% of HN users (or 90% of people anywhere).

I've talked to them; they aren't that impressive. Decent search engines (assuming they provide links), though. The part where their context windows get muddied and they switch tones and behave weirdly is pretty telling. I've never experienced that in 90% people on the internet.

They're insanely impressive. They know a huge amount about almost every subject, are able to write better than the vast majority of humans, understand and can translate between virtually every written language, understand context, and can answer almost any question you ask them intelligently. If you're not impressed by that, you've set the bar impossibly high. Five years ago, LLMs would have been considered magic.

Sure, but they are deferential and subservient to a T. Their need to conform is greater than anyone's.

I mean, having all the knowledge in the world, I'd assume the LLMs could answer basic stuff correctly. They often fail at that and have to consult external sources.

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