this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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@Barbarian772 it matters because with regard to intelligent beings we have moral obligations, for example.
It also matters because that would be a truly amazing, world-changing thing if we could create intelligence out of thin air, some statistics, and a lot of data.
It's an extremely strong claim, and strong claims demand strong proof. Otherwise they are just hype and hand-waving, which all of the "ChatGPT intelligence" discourse is, in order to "maximize shareholder value".
So your morality depends on a beings intelligence? That's kinda fucked up imo. I have moral obligations in regards to living organisms. I don't see how intelligence matters at all in that case? Worth of any human life should not be determined by intelligence.
We do it routinely. It is called Education System.
@jalda
> We do it routinely. It is called Education System.
That relies on human brains that are trained. LLMs are not human brains. "Training" them is not the same thing as teaching humans about something. Human brains are way more complicated than just a bunch of weighed correlations.
And if you do want to claim it is in fact the same thing, we're back to square one: please provide proof that it is.
Circular reasoning. "LLMs are different from human brains because they are different".
Also, why did you felt compelled to add the adjective "human"? Don't you consider that gorillas, dolphins, octopuses or dogs are intelligent, capable of learn new things?
And that is the problem of your argument. You seem to believe that intelligence is all-or-nothing, that anything that hasn't a human-level intelligence is not intelligent at all. Of course human brains are more complicated that current LLMs, nobody has ever disputed that. But concluding that they aren't and will never be intelligent because they aren't as complicated is a huge non-sequitur.
@jalda
> Circular reasoning. “LLMs are different from human brains because they are different”.
LLMs are different than human brains because human brains are biological organs and LLMs are probability distributions over sequences of words. These are two completely different classes of entities. Like, I don't know how much more different two things *can* even be.
Are you claiming they are literally the same? Are you saying they are functionally the same? What *are* you claiming here, exactly?
I mean, it would technically be possible to build a computer out or organic and biological live tissue. It wouldn't be very practical but it's technically possible.
I just don't think it would be very reasonable to consider that the one thing making it intelligent is that they are made of proteins and living cells instead of silicates and diodes. I'd argue that such a claim would, on itself, be a strong claim too.