I think that people's believe in LLM is intelligence is closely tied to mistaken association between intelligence and the ability to speak.
Parrots can speak, but they cannot reason. Moreover, evolutionary, birds learned to mimic the speech to fool other species. To fool in such way that other species would think that parrots are of the same specie.
We, the humans, are smart enough to recognise that even though parrots can talk, they are not as smart as we are. Unfortunately for us, LLMs are much more advanced things than parrots, and they are capable to fool broad masses pretending that LLMs are of the human specie with all inherent features including the reasoning intelligence (that we cannot easily test externally).
This is unfortunate, because such false believes slow down actual scientific progress towards the natural intelligence researches, and towards creating of the true reasoning artificial intelligence.
Btw, I wouldn't be surprised that if one day the AGI created, it will not be able to speak at all, nor recognise the images.
I believe you are vastly underestimating the capabilities of parrots or similarly intelligent birds.
At least when my pet parrot manages to fool me into whatever it is he wants to get out of me that time, he does it for his own primal benefit and not because it was programmed to adhere to some strict set of ethic and moral boundaries set by legal requirements and someone else's idea of how people should think and behave.
I don't think that following the primal benefit would be a good estimation for intelligence, despite the fact that such behavior is common for most species.
What makes human specie special is the ability of some individuals to create new things that didn't exist before. That's a loose criteria of course, because most individuals just follow educated social constructs for their entire life.
Oh yes I agree on that. I should have specified that I was arguing their ability to reason - which from my own experience these birds do most definitely possess to a surprising extend. They are smart, and they have all day to figure out which buttons to press to get you to do something specific they find funny or other such things.
The smart behaviour of parrots and their speech synthesis are two different phenomenon.
Parrots are definitely smart, and parrots can definitely speak, but they can't learn to speak beyond what they are trained to do. It's not like a parrot has ever spontaneously put together a coherent sentence independently.
Absolutely, I also replied to the OP's response below that I failed to specify that I was arguing parrots' ability to reason which I do believe exists to a great extend.
Regardless, speech is just another means of communication. In the end it doesn't really matter if I use perfectly articulated Swahili or just scream "aaar" at you for a few seconds as long as I get the cheeseburger with extra cheese I want from you. These parrots, much like children, just push your buttons and are quite good at finding (or negotiating) the right pattern of things to do and sounds to make to get to a certain outcome.
Relatively advanced problem solving abilities are well documented in some species of birds, such as crows.
>LLMs are much more advanced things than parrots
Hardly. Parrots are able to fly, find food, find mates, interact with other parrots and lots of other things than no LLM is even close to being able to do.
I was hoping that it would be clear from the context, that LLMs are more advanced than birds in just the ability to synthesise the speech close to human speech in its complexity.
Sorry, I didn't mean to offend the parrots. I like parrots too! :)
My belief they have some sort of intelligence is more based on GPT-4 being able to figure out stuff I can't figure out myself. Things like "why doesn't this bit of code work" or "how can I write code to do blah blah blah..." It's not quite like human intelligence, better in some ways, worse in others. The better bit is it has far more information than the average human, the worse is it's reasoning is not as good as a smart human though maybe ahead of some dumb ones.
Hinton thinks LLMs can "understand" because without understanding it's impossible to predict the next work as effectively as GPT-4. The only way to do that is to understand the meaning in the text. He also says he's given GPT-4 a novel reasoning problem he invented and it successfully answered, which wouldn't be possible without a level of understanding/intelligence (although I'm not sure how he ensured the problem wasn't in its training data).
Well, my point was that the speech by itself is not a good criteria to estimate the intellect. This is not only applicable to machines but to humans as well. I assume that the primary evolutionary determined purpose of a speech function was convincing rather than the source of reasoning. Even though we use natural languages to broadcast the information, the languages usually overwhelmed with linguistics and psychological tricks to make an illusion of usefulness and novelty of this information. Even if the information was truly novel, it's usually hard or even impossible to find the roots. This is one of the reasons of why most people prefer to learn rather to invent. Broadcasting of information of inventions made by someone else is much simpler and usually more beneficial than researching something from scratch. And our natural language specifically designed for such forms of broadcastings.
In this sense if the ML developers would be focused on the inventions automatisation, I would expect that they would choose something more formalised than the natural language.
Anyway, whatever way and methods they chose I think the better external estimation criteria of intelligence should be the ability to make completely new things that clearly didn't exist before. Not just reasoning about existing one. After all, it's not a new thing that computers are able to deduce. Any programming language can do that better than any chat bot.
Parrots can speak, but they cannot reason. Moreover, evolutionary, birds learned to mimic the speech to fool other species. To fool in such way that other species would think that parrots are of the same specie.
We, the humans, are smart enough to recognise that even though parrots can talk, they are not as smart as we are. Unfortunately for us, LLMs are much more advanced things than parrots, and they are capable to fool broad masses pretending that LLMs are of the human specie with all inherent features including the reasoning intelligence (that we cannot easily test externally).
This is unfortunate, because such false believes slow down actual scientific progress towards the natural intelligence researches, and towards creating of the true reasoning artificial intelligence.
Btw, I wouldn't be surprised that if one day the AGI created, it will not be able to speak at all, nor recognise the images.