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Comment by jacobgold | Hacker News Reader

Maybe just a very rigorous version of the Turing test? Modern LLMs can superficially simulate conversation but it's trivial to force them into revealing their non-human like intelligence.

They've been "patched" since but all models fail basic tests like "Should I walk or drive to the car wash which is 100 feet away" by recommending you walk.

So you'd just ask questions that require theory of mind, abstract and common sense reasoning, causal inference, learning novel rules, transferring knowledge novel situations, recognizing ambiguity, etc.

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If an alien lands on Earth and learns English, would you deem it non-intelligent if you can tell it apart from a human in conversation?

I think we should consider slime mold intelligent, and realise that it's a spectrum. Path finding is AI. There are probably forms of intelligence we have yet to discover.

If an alien landed we could decide whether it seems to have a human-like intelligence or not. It could be incredibly intelligent but very non-human-like.

Can you give me one example that works on Claude right now?

I'm never sure whether this indicates "no reasoning present" or you've just hit an odd behaviour in the AI such that its reasoning fails. For example, you present a problem in a way that's dissimilar to the way problems are presented in its training set. That doesn't mean it's not reasoning, just it can only reason correctly in some circumstances.

The models are continually patched with training and post-training. All you have to do is find an area they haven't patched yet, and they'll be just as stupid. I run into deep technical examples every day where they fail in the most basic ways no human ever would.

I'm pretty sure most people building these models would admit they don't operate as human-like intelligences? It's baffling that anyone thinks they are.

Yes I agree, they’re an alien kind of intelligence.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t reason.

I get what you're saying but this is kind of a semantic game.

These LLM models/agents absolutely do not reason in the sense that humans do, so you're quietly redefining the word.

You can say of course decide to call them an "alien kind of intelligence" that "reasons" but you could just as reasonably say that calculators are an "alien" kind of intelligence that "reasons" about math differently than us.

And what stops what AIs do from being "reasoning"? What's the elusive magic fairy dust of reasoning that humans put into their napkin notes, but AIs neglect to put into their chain of thought scratchpads?

Do you have a RealReasoningBenchmark, perhaps, that can reliably tell apart that fake mass produced token-flavored AI reasoning from the real, organic, 100% natural human reasoning?

If you had access to a bunch identical copies of me that couldn't communicate with each other, you'd be able to find many questions I would give stupid answers to. I suspect I'd come out of it looking worse than an LLM.

How old does a child need to be before you think they have "human like intelligence"?

I would walk

Me too. At least it doesn't say I need to wash my car.

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