Skip Navigation
Jump
Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate
  • That's a disturbing handwave. "We don't really know what intelligence is, so therefore, anything we call intelligence is fair game"

    A thermometer tells me what temperature it is. It senses the ambient heat energy and responds with a numeric indicator. Is that intelligence?

    My microwave stops when it notices steam from my popcorn bag. Is that intelligence?

    If I open an encyclopedia book to a page about computers, it tells me a bunch of information about computers. Is that intelligence?

    6
  • Jump
    Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate
  • I mean, I think intelligence requires the ability to integrate new information into one's knowledge base. LLMs can't do that, they have to be trained on a fixed corpus.

    Also, LLMs have a pretty shit-tastic track record of being able to differentiate correct data from bullshit, which is a pretty essential facet of intelligence IMO

    8
  • Jump
    Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate
  • There's a good point here that like about 80% of what we're calling AI right now... isn't even AI or even LLM. It's just.... algorithm, code, plain old math. I'm pretty sure someone is going to refer to a calculator as AI soon. "Wow, it knows math! Just like a person! Amazing technology!"

    (That's putting aside the very question of whether LLMs should even qualify as AIs at all.)

    10
  • Jump
    Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate
  • This is easy to say about the output of AIs.... if you don't check their work.

    Alas, checking for accuracy these days seems to be considered old fogey stuff.

    17
  • Jump
    Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate
  • Yeah, and Wikipedia is one of the most useful sites on the net, but it didn't exactly result in the entire web becoming crowdsourced.

    15