alt Hacker NewsYou're working with mystical definitions of words like "intelligence" and "reasoning", where there's some ineffable quality that you can't define that makes those properties difficult to achieve.
I'm not a mystic, so what I care about is functional behavior. Functionally speaking, models perform the functional equivalent of reasoning. Functionally speaking, they exhibit intelligence. Is it a perfect equivalent of human intelligence? Obviously not, but so what? The ball is in your court if you want to try to nail down the mystical quality you think isn't being achieved.
One hardly needs to soar to the exalted heights of "mysticism" or any sort of "ineffable qualities" to come into contact with the limitations of LLMs.
1) Models do not perform the functional equivalent of reasoning at all. When we reason, we don't simply babble out textual derivations of prior examples of "reasoning" to which we have been exposed, arrive at a conclusion, then occasionally state an altogether different conclusion while pointing at the largely irrelevant reasoning to substantiate it.
2) Models have real-world, not-at-all-mystical functional constraints that are directly relevant to the production of everyday economic work in which one attempts to involve them. Their inability to extrapolate or maintain clear mental models leads to staggering, head-scratching mistakes that even a very feeble and developmentally awry human intelligence would not make.
A basic, if well-worn example that was widely discussed in the last year or two:
https://medium.com/@JerryCuomo/why-ai-gets-the-strawberry-qu...
However, this is emblematic of a much larger idea: the LLM doesn't have any idea what a letter is or what you're asking it to do. This isn't a question of "ineffable qualia"; when it doesn't know what something is at any essential level, it can't competently solve problems related to it. One bumps up against this in everyday programming and all the time.
Also, what is "mystical" about my demand for the kind of scientific progress--no, forget that, any scientific progress--that a functional superhuman intelligence would yield? I am not a "mystic", either; I want functional results, show me the functionality.