alt Hacker NewsHere’s another perspective for you, which is shared by a significantly larger number of people than you seem to realise:
Humans aren’t special. Other animals are intelligent and interesting too. A machine could be intelligent. LLMs aren’t.
In other words, believing in human exceptionalism is not a prerequisite to understand the current crop of AI is not the end all be all of its hype. It is supremely common that AI proponents do not understand that, however. Like hardcore cryptocurrency fans who believe anyone who doesn’t like them is “just jealous they didn’t make bank”, too many hardcore AI proponents believe anyone who doesn’t think LLMs are intelligent is jealous of humans no longer being unique, or afraid for their jobs, or whatever. In both cases it’s obvious that what those proponents lack is empathy, the ability to understand not everyone has the same selfish thoughts they do.
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The interesting question then becomes what is missing from LLMs that we and supposedly other possible machines have? I've yet to come across a reasonable definition of intelligence that the current crop of LLMs is clearly incapable of.
>A machine could be intelligent. LLMs aren’t.
You are completely incorrect. You're falling in the same trap that most humans fall into. That is you're completely incapable of seeing intelligence at different scales.
Cells have intelligence. Organs have intelligence. Bodies outside the brain have intelligence. Hell, many scientists accept that things like proteins likely have intelligence as they can adapt in their environment, and many more are making claims that algorithms have intelligence.
You, as of so far have given no explanatory evidence of where intelligence emerges from, only "I'll know it when I see it". The actual definition of intelligence doesn't work this way. Any, and I mean any neural network is capable of narrow intelligence. Going lower into algorithmic intelligence, the applications and CPU on your computer are intelligent in some measures.
Go outside of your extremely narrow definition of whatever you think intelligence is and learn more about it. You could start studying now and it will take the rest of your life learning more to grasp how far the scales of, the simplicity, and the complexity of intelligence actually go.