> ... including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection.

But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier.

I don't see any fundamental difference in functionality between human intellectual contributions vs performant ML ones (LLM or otherwise).

Whenever we listen or read text we are also predicting the near future content.

Just like LLM's we sometimes correctly predict the next token or word, and sometimes incorrectly.

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model [...]

Imagine someone could pause the universe with a remote control, scroll back in time a little, press play again, and ask a slightly different question, etc.

In such a thought experiment one could also collect the probabilities for a specific human predicting a next word. Implicitly the brain also has a corresponding statistical model, regardless of the construction being visible or hidden. I.e. human intelligence is also fundamentally a statistical model, so the only thing that remains from your claim is that machines for some unmentioned reason don't possess any "real" intelligence or critical thought...

Is it possible that our aversion is simply driven by educational systems collectively and deeply ingraining into populations the idea that intelligence deserves the high costs commanded. Well of course this justifies higher wages towards the higher leadership positions, etc. Now it turns out that intelligence can be dirt cheap. We discover that the fact that "intelligence must be costly so don't question the costs of leadership" was never fundamentally true, so the real anger is this discovery of mismatch between the old claims which served to explain how every society that claimed to order itself and fill positions accordingly with "naturally pre-ordained individuals". Now we are seeing robots exceed average workers, for effectively a grain of rice.

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever.

I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. Which says a lot about humans.

Idk something about a mirror maybe and the output reflecting the input?

Some of it the effect of tells. “It’s not X, it’s Y” is not a bad pattern but it was baked into the instruction following training set just like the other patterns. I catch myself about to use it and use something else because I want to look human. I have, a few times, tried to use AI to write something that I was struggling to find the words and I just didn’t like how it didn’t seem like my voice. If there was just one person doing it would be OK but when it is 100s of blog posts submitted to HN a day it is like wearing a “I’m an NPC” t-shirt.

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

Why is being statistics/algorithms wrong? What's wrong with that? The "A" means artificial so none of this seems surprising or weird or bad.

AI is just a good permutation/combination engine that tries to act smart with help of statistics. At best I only see AI as, 1. An autocomplete on steroid, 2. Good search/correlation engine

Are we sure there is some objective, technical definition of what is intelligence and what is not?

Isn't it rather a subjective philosophical concept? What if human intelligence is also a statistical model, trained by evolution to make decisions that lead to offspring?

The one major difference I see between AI and people is the ability to learn and memorize. All memory/learning solutions that current AI architectures offer just feel like workarounds and simply don't work anywhere near as a person learning something new and remembering it.

Thank you for helping me keep my sanity.

I mean this in the kindest way possible, but you are wrong that the math solutions are that easily dismissed. And there are many more than are publicized. A specific math problem I wanted solved for 3 years did not get solved by any model until fable and, and I tried it on every model and know the literature surrounding it well.