Most people don’t consider animals to have intelligence (outside of some apes) which is why they’re readily used as food.

They’re used as food because that’s how people have been socialized. Nobody would willingly eat a dog, but they would eat a pig. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs.

If you’re old enough you likely learned in school that animals aren’t intelligent or capable of consciousness or self-awareness. None of those things are true.

Thanks for proving my point, your service is invaluable.

LLMs are explosively imprecise, statistically luke-warm, grey goo extrusion sphincters. They can’t produce anything novel, at best they can reveal potentially plausible information from the data they were trained on, which then requires proven domain expertise to validate.

Intelligence requires comprehension, a trait LLMs are intrinsically incapable of performing.

Define comprehension then.

Understanding, context[0].

Computers are particularly adept at iteration, and LLMs are an application that leverages this effectively. To wit, I’ll concede LLMs are ‘AI’, where that initialisation represents Accelerated Iteration, or in management as Amplified Incompetence, but as an example of Intelligence, that remains for those who are proud of their lack of the naturally occurring variety.

[0]: to frame a larger memory pool as a ‘context window’ is a misnomer, as context requires understanding and comprehension.

I mean, if your argument is just semantics, that’s just… pedantic.

You could draw that line anywhere. The NPCs I play against in a strategy game could be “intelligence.”

You know what people mean. People are talking about ~anthropic cognition, which is clearly not what’s going on in current LLMs. They can do intelligent things, maybe they are an “intelligent” by some definition you define, but they are not even close to animalistic cognition.

You and others here act as if this is some clear cut thing, while actually defining it is extremely hard and everything but clear cut.

I find it scary how many people here are blindly against LMMs directly (not the big companies behind them or whatever) with about as much irrational hate as the people they despise, like Trump. They act the same way. Saying LMMs are not intelligent is so absurd I am not sure how to go forward, such a statement is oozing with bias.

with about as much irrational hate as the people they despise, like Trump.

Thanks for outing yourself. Makes it easy to just skip the conversation and not bother trying to open up a conversation made in bad faith.

I’m not againt LLMs. They’re usefull tools, and I’ve been tinkering with them since 2021, and generative ML before that. I have one loaded on my desktop pretty much all the time; DeepseekV4 0731 is running, right this second.

I use them all the time. I hack at them as a hobby; I know how useful they can be.

But you’re stopping just short of calling them “alive.” They’re not even close, not even in the same universe. They do tasks with intelligence or some variant of that, but they are not intelligent. And I’m not trying to be pedantic, that is a loaded term that implies cognition and adaptability they do not have.

They’re basically the same thing as weather prediction models, but for text output. They’re just a model.

And I think its very dangerous when people fall into the trap of thinking they are, fundamentally, more than that. That’s the fantasy Altman and such are selling the public, to con them.

Hence, the article above ^. What’s coming out of these leaders’ mouths does not match what people are getting, and they can tell. And that’s because the premise they’re being sold, of “artificial intelligence,” is a lie.

It is not alive, why do you suspect I think that way?

And again, if those LLM are not intelligent we set an extremely high bar that even some humans will not reach. And it only gets higher.

Intelligence can be defined as sentience or sapience. LLMs lack both (they just regurgitate information and have neither understanding nor self-awareness).

How can you tell they lack all of these things when people testing it shows these have it? So it appears as if, but you say that is not actually the case. How do you tell?

I can write a bash script in five minutes that will say it’s alive if you ask, does that make it so?

No, that’s the whole point! Define it.

For starters, an LLM wouldn’t even survive in the body of a small insect. They’re incompetent at everything.

Prove me wrong. Make an LLM-powered insect that buys more LLM-powered insects. Have it demonstrate any fitness at all.

If you train an AI to do it, I am sure it would completely destroy nature. It would find “bugs” like getting on an aircraft to reach new areas, teamwork to destroy any enemy etc.

I’m sure it wouldn’t. Prove it, you’re wrong. Existing bugs already do that stuff better. And “if you train it” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, since actual bugs can handle novel situations.

Have you never wondered how some animal would completely take over if it was just a bit smarter? Example: A single fox can kill dozens of chicken. Imagine the chicken working together and attacking it, picking out the eyes etc. instead of literally not defending at all.

Or a herd of cow or whatever herd animal that could easily team up and trample/stomp/crush/… a predator but instead they all just run away and the slowest is dead.

Smarter is expensive! The brain will use more calories and cost more. LLMs are drastically less energy-efficient than natural brains. We’re one of the few cases where spending more on compute was worth it.

You’re describing eusociality, not intelligence. One might argue that ants have completely taken over, but they aren’t necessarily smarter than solitary wasps. LLMs only exist because of a huge economy behind them, and it remains to be seen how widespread they’ll be once they’re expected to generate a profit.

So it is only a matter of time before compute is cheap/small enough and AI optimized enough before I would be right? Or we just use larger animals like elephants?

I suppose, sure. But I’m not convinced that goal is possible to achieve; the biological organisms have billions of years of head start. Elephants aren’t wasting their huge brains either.