Would you consider someone with anterograde amnesia not to be intelligent?
There is also the nature of the human brain, it is not just those systems of memory encoding, storage, and use of that in narratives. People with this type of amnesia still can learn physical skills and that happens in a totally different area of the brain with no need for the hippocampus->neocortex consolidation loop. So, the intelligence is significantly diminished, but not entirely. Other parts of the brain are still able to update themselves in ways an LLM currently cannot. The human with amnesia also has a complex biological sensory input mapping that is still active and integrating and restructuring the brain. So, I think when you get into the nuances of the human in this state vs. an LLM we can still say the human crosses some threshold for intelligence where the LLM does not in this framework.
So, they have an "intelligence", localized to the present in terms of their TPN and memory formation. LLMs have this kind of "intelligence". But the human still has the capacity to rewire at least some of their brain in real time even with amnesia.
Sure, but just because LLMs don't have what we'd describe as human intelligence, doesn't mean they don't have intelligence.
I think we're witnessing the creation and growth a weird new type of intelligence right now.
It's so much less important or interesting to like nail down some definition here (I would cite HN discourse the past three years or so), than it is to recognize what it means to assign "intelligent" to something. What assumptions does it make? What power does it valorize or curb?
Each side of this debate does themselves a disservice essentially just trying to be Aristotle way too late. "Intelligence" did not precede someone saying it of some phenomena, there is nothing to uncover or finalize here. The point is you have one side that really wants, for explicit and implicit reasons, to call this thing intelligent, even if it looks like a duck but doesn't quack like one, and vice versa on the other side.
Either way, we seem fundamentally incapable of being radical enough to reject AI on its own terms, or be proper champions of it. It is just tribal hypedom clinging to totem signifiers.
Good luck though!
You can also then compare that mapping of the human brain to other biological brains and start to figure out the delta and which of those things in the delta create something most people would consider intelligence. You can then do that same mapping to an LLM or any other AI construct that purports intelligence. It certainly will never be a biological intelligence in its current statistical model form. But could it be an Intelligence. Maybe.
I don't think, if you are grounded, AI did anything to your philosophical mapping of the mind. In fact, it is pretty easy to do this mapping if you take some time and are honest. If you buy into the narratives constructed around the output of an LLM then you are not, by definition, being very grounded.
The other thing is, human intelligence is the only real intelligence we know about. Intelligence is defined by thought and limited by our thought and language. It provides the upper bounds of what we can ever express in its current form. So, yes, we do have a tendency to stamp a narrative of human intelligence onto any other intelligence but that is just surface level. We de decompose it to the limits of our language and categorization capabilities therein.
There's a long and proud history of discounting animal intelligence, probably because if we actually thought animals were intelligent we'd want to stop eating them.
Octopodes are sentient. Cetaceans have well-developed language. Elephants grieve their dead. Anyone who has owned a dog knows that it has some intelligence and is capable of communicating with us. There's a ton of other intelligences that we know about.
> As humans, we have conveniently made those properties match things only we have.
I think this is the key point. Machine intelligence is not going to look like human intelligence, any more than animal intelligence does. We can't talk to the dolphins, not because they're not smart and don't have language, but because we can't work out their language. Though I'm not sure what we'd even say to them, because they live in a world we'll never understand, and vice versa. When Claude finally reaches consciousness, it's not going to look like a human consciousness, and actually talking to that consciousness is going to be difficult because we won't share a reality.
An LLM is a tool. I can just about stretch to it being an Artificial Intelligence, but I prefer to continue being specific and call it an LLM rather than an AI. It is not conscious or self-aware. It fakes self-awareness because as a tool the thing it does is have conversations with humans, and humans often ask it questions about itself. But I don't think anyone actually believes it is self-aware. Not least because the only time it thinks is when prompted.
Cognitive computer science explores this whole area of mapping language and the underlying semantic meaning. Ultimately, these intelligences will be bound by physics (unless some new physics or understanding therein happens). And classical intelligences are still bound by classical physics. So I am not sure we can't relate to these other intelligences. We may be limited to some translation layer that does not fully map, but can we still relate to some other consciousness? For that matter consciousness is just another word that vaguely maps to a vast and extremely complex thing in the human brain and each person has a different understanding of what that is. I don't really have any conclusions, you brought up interesting points. We should sit within this realm of inquiry with a lot of humility IMO.
We have fundamental communication problems between humans who have different cultures, as anyone who has worked in a different culture knows. How much different would a dolphin be? And then how much different would an actual AI be? What concepts would we share and be able to build on to understand each other? How do we avoid the fundamental communication misunderstandings when we don't share any concepts of our reality?
They still have roughly the same kind of hardware as we do. Their different brain region is kind of like a coprocessor we don't have. But based on their behavior they are likely doing the same things we are. I would say they would be more like an extreme human culture than something alien. They probably have very different category mappings based on echolocation.
I think because we know their brains are doing a lot of things that are analogs to ours, just with different sensory inputs we can reason about a dolphin brain and their semantic concepts and category mappings way easier than an AI. Dolphins do a lot of the same stuff we do. Grief. Social groups. Predicting the future. I would bet at a single level of semantic abstraction we have a lot of concepts that map. They have a lot of the same hormones we do. They react to danger very similar to us. I think a lot maps, we just don't know how to share that with each other beyond observation of one another and offerings like food and things that translate for any mammal.
I think this is probably neuroscience vs psychology. We can explain a lot with neuroscience, but two people with essentially identical brain chemistry can have very different psychology. There are people out there who have beliefs and cognition processes that I find completely incomprehensible despite having the same brain and even sharing a language.
I'm not sure how I'd have a meaningful conversation with an animal that has such a different worldview. I guess there's a simple level of conversation, like that which we have with dogs - fetch the stick, good boy, food, need to wee, love the human, etc. But if that's the limit of what we can discuss with dolphins (or an actual AI) then I'd be disappointed.
Dolphin has concept maps between objects and semantic meaning and an "I" narrative. Dog is almost fully present with no narrative constantly mapping past to future. We probably have a lot more in common with dolphin, if we can map that somehow.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
This article is right up this conversation's alley; about chimps being fascinated with crystals. And I am not saying it is wrong to map and communicate, communication means cooperation, deeper connection and meaning, discovering boundaries of if we can socially coordinate and form new and exciting groups and collaboration, etc.
I wonder how we would "hang" with an actual AI, though? I guess I'm assuming that it will be a meta-level above the chat and prompts. That's just the ocean it swims in, not it's actual consciousness.
"Intelligence" is used most commonly to refer to a class or collection of cognitive abilities. I don't think there is a consensus on an exact collection or specific class that the word covers, even if you consider specific scientific domains.
LLMs have honestly been a fun way to explore that. They obviously have a "kind" of intelligence, namely pattern recall. Wrap them in an agent and you get another kind: pattern composition. Those kinds of intelligences have been applied to mathematics for decades, but LLMs have allowed use to apply them to a semantic text domain.
I wonder if you could wrap image diffusion models in an agent set up the same way and get some new ability as well.
LLMs falls apart on really simple reasoning tasks because when there is no statistical mapping to a problem in its network it has to generate a massive amount of tokens to maybe find the right statistical match to this new concept. It is so slow. It is not something you or I would recognize as a process of logical reasoning. It is more like statistically brute forcing reason by way of its statistical echo.
So, I guess pattern recall is the right words. Or statistical pattern matching. Recall works if you view a trained model as memories, which is how I often model what they store in my own mind. So, it is... something. Maybe intelligence. Maybe just a really convincing simulation of the outputs of intelligence. Is there a difference? Fundamentally I think so.
Or perhaps you were referring to the impact of the two in that the "sledgehammer" of "they can't make new memories" is a lot more effective than the tiny scalpel of "if you do a wikipedia search this is a single one of the relevant articles"
I pulled it up because I was familiar with this fact.
That's fascinating!
From this standpoint I wonder, when Anthropic makes decisions like this, if they take into account Claude as a stakeholder and what Claude will learn about their behaviour and relationship to it on the next training run.
Oh they definitely do. If you pay attention in AI circles, you'll hear a lot of people talking about writing to the future Claudes. Not unlike those developers and writers who put little snippets in their blogs and news articles about who they are and how great they are, and then later the LLMs report that information back as truth. In this case, Anthropic is very interested in ensuring that Claude develops a cohesive personality by basically founding snippets of the personality within the corpus of training data, which is the broad internet and research papers.