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Is there a distinction between LLM’s and AI, or do we consider LLM’s to exhibit intellect? I remeber Sam Altman pointing out in some interview that he consider

Is there a distinction between LLM’s and AI, or do we consider LLM’s to exhibit intellect? I remeber Sam Altman pointing out in some interview that he considers GPT to be a reasoning machine. I suppose that if you consider what GPT does to be resoning, then calling it AI is not so far fetched. I feel it’s more like pattern recognition though rather than reasoning, since there’s no black box ”reasoning” component in an LLM.

nathansherburn 2y ago
How do you think reasoning happens in our brains? I wonder if it's more like an LLM than we realise?
Filligree 2y ago
There is no black box 'reasoning' component in humans either. I will grant you that humans are far more intelligent, and after spending thousands of hours playing with LLMs, it's hard not to see their limitations. At the same time... they're dumb like a very dumb person who has (implausibly) read the Library of Congress, not like a rock or a computer. I often use Claude to write short stories, largely just for fun. Certainly, its skill at English vastly outmatches its skill at reasoning. It doesn't write well, but it regularly produces turns of phrase that makes me laugh; meanwhile, it needs hand-holding to successfully handle situations with asymmetrical knowledge. It's bad at theory of mind. But it's just bad, in more or less the same way that a two-year-old is bad at it. Not the best reasoner in the world. It would be false to claim it's as smart as the typical seven-year-old... It's almost as wrong to claim that it can't reason at all.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  But it's not reasoning, it's just wordplay, just a gargantuanly complex level of auto-generated ELIZA.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    It definitely feels like reasoning. Problems get solved. They may be simple problems, but it's still far beyond what a calculator can do. Does it really matter if it's "just wordplay"? I'm not convinced humans are any different, beyond the sheer scale. I certainly don't believe we have a 'reasoning module'.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      You don't know the history of ELIZA, do you? That story goes way deeper than some wordplay fooling people. The entire intent was to get people to realize that it was worthless, but, even after people learned that and what it was, they clamoured for more! "Just imagine how stupid the average person is, and them remember that half of them are even stupider than that!" --George Carlin And, yes, we humans are very different, but you'll have to traverse my recent comment history to get the extensive explanation. It's worth it, though, I promise, but I doubt you'll like it or agree with it. Good luck!
    - genericspammer 2y ago
      You raise good points, I agree it feels like it is reasoning at times. Though the brain, with our current understanding of it, is by far more of a black box to us than any LLM. > I certainly don't believe we have a 'reasoning module'. Let’s also point out that human brains probably don’t have any vector databases in them either. It seems to me like our brains must work very differently - just look at how much energy an LLM consumes compared to our brains consuming around 12 Watts.
_heimdall 2y ago
I've been annoyed by the redefinition of artificial intelligence since the LLM boom started. The term AI has no place being used to describe LLMs as far as I can tell, unless what goes on inside the black box of an LLM is drastically different than how they are described to function. Predicting the next token based on a compressed dataset of human generated content isn't intelligence in any meaningful definition of the word. That doesn't mean LLMs aren't impressive or useful for certain tasks, but they aren't intelligent. When Altman describes them as reasoning machines he's either lying (likely for marketing purposes) or using a different definition of "reasoning" than most people would. The latest release of GPT is attempting to mimic reasoning, but what they're actually doing is having one system act as an automated prompt engineer in between the GPT model and the end user.
- IanCal 2y ago
  What redefinition? SVMs were part of AI and they're far simpler. The field of AI has covered basic algorithms for decades before LLMs.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Do you consider a basic algorithm to be artificial intelligence? You are right though, you van go back further than LLMs and find misuses of the term "artificial intelligence." That doesn't contradict my main point though, that the word has been so redefined as to be pretty meaningless to the understanding of what intelligence is. If we want to consider even basic algorithms to be intelligence, are we boiling down the entire concept of intelligence to mathematical equations?
    - IanCal 2y ago
      > misuses of the term "artificial intelligence." If it's been the way the field has used it for decades, it's not really a misuse. > that the word has been so redefined It's not been redefined though, other than people now wanting to moan about PR and things not being "real" AI when we've had AGI as a term to use right there. > If we want to consider even basic algorithms to be intelligence, are we boiling down the entire concept of intelligence to mathematical equations? Massive side argument, but I think we obey physical laws and are not magical and so fundamentally I can't see another answer.
smolder 2y ago
I remember expert systems being considered AI, so LLMs ought to meet that bar as well. They aren't AGI, though, which is a higher one, I guess. I'm not in love with the various terms and the various ways people define them. Even LLM --at what point is it "large"? In a rapidly changing area of both academic and lay understanding, it's understandable for terminology to be a bit unstable. I don't think it's reasonable to say LLMs do reasoning, however. Even when mimicking incredible feats of intelligence, they don't have a grasp of what is true or how truth flows from a set of facts to any other.
otikik 2y ago
It was a marketing trick. LLMs are not AI, the same way that a picture of a man is not a man.

nathansherburn 2y ago

How do you think reasoning happens in our brains? I wonder if it's more like an LLM than we realise?

Filligree 2y ago

There is no black box 'reasoning' component in humans either. I will grant you that humans are far more intelligent, and after spending thousands of hours playing with LLMs, it's hard not to see their limitations. At the same time... they're dumb like a very dumb person who has (implausibly) read the Library of Congress, not like a rock or a computer. I often use Claude to write short stories, largely just for fun. Certainly, its skill at English vastly outmatches its skill at reasoning. It doesn't write well, but it regularly produces turns of phrase that makes me laugh; meanwhile, it needs hand-holding to successfully handle situations with asymmetrical knowledge. It's bad at theory of mind. But it's just bad, in more or less the same way that a two-year-old is bad at it. Not the best reasoner in the world. It would be false to claim it's as smart as the typical seven-year-old... It's almost as wrong to claim that it can't reason at all.

MrMcCall 2y ago
But it's not reasoning, it's just wordplay, just a gargantuanly complex level of auto-generated ELIZA.
- Filligree 2y ago
  It definitely feels like reasoning. Problems get solved. They may be simple problems, but it's still far beyond what a calculator can do. Does it really matter if it's "just wordplay"? I'm not convinced humans are any different, beyond the sheer scale. I certainly don't believe we have a 'reasoning module'.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    You don't know the history of ELIZA, do you? That story goes way deeper than some wordplay fooling people. The entire intent was to get people to realize that it was worthless, but, even after people learned that and what it was, they clamoured for more! "Just imagine how stupid the average person is, and them remember that half of them are even stupider than that!" --George Carlin And, yes, we humans are very different, but you'll have to traverse my recent comment history to get the extensive explanation. It's worth it, though, I promise, but I doubt you'll like it or agree with it. Good luck!
  - genericspammer 2y ago
    You raise good points, I agree it feels like it is reasoning at times. Though the brain, with our current understanding of it, is by far more of a black box to us than any LLM. > I certainly don't believe we have a 'reasoning module'. Let’s also point out that human brains probably don’t have any vector databases in them either. It seems to me like our brains must work very differently - just look at how much energy an LLM consumes compared to our brains consuming around 12 Watts.

_heimdall 2y ago

I've been annoyed by the redefinition of artificial intelligence since the LLM boom started. The term AI has no place being used to describe LLMs as far as I can tell, unless what goes on inside the black box of an LLM is drastically different than how they are described to function. Predicting the next token based on a compressed dataset of human generated content isn't intelligence in any meaningful definition of the word. That doesn't mean LLMs aren't impressive or useful for certain tasks, but they aren't intelligent. When Altman describes them as reasoning machines he's either lying (likely for marketing purposes) or using a different definition of "reasoning" than most people would. The latest release of GPT is attempting to mimic reasoning, but what they're actually doing is having one system act as an automated prompt engineer in between the GPT model and the end user.

IanCal 2y ago
What redefinition? SVMs were part of AI and they're far simpler. The field of AI has covered basic algorithms for decades before LLMs.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Do you consider a basic algorithm to be artificial intelligence? You are right though, you van go back further than LLMs and find misuses of the term "artificial intelligence." That doesn't contradict my main point though, that the word has been so redefined as to be pretty meaningless to the understanding of what intelligence is. If we want to consider even basic algorithms to be intelligence, are we boiling down the entire concept of intelligence to mathematical equations?
  - IanCal 2y ago
    > misuses of the term "artificial intelligence." If it's been the way the field has used it for decades, it's not really a misuse. > that the word has been so redefined It's not been redefined though, other than people now wanting to moan about PR and things not being "real" AI when we've had AGI as a term to use right there. > If we want to consider even basic algorithms to be intelligence, are we boiling down the entire concept of intelligence to mathematical equations? Massive side argument, but I think we obey physical laws and are not magical and so fundamentally I can't see another answer.

smolder 2y ago

I remember expert systems being considered AI, so LLMs ought to meet that bar as well. They aren't AGI, though, which is a higher one, I guess. I'm not in love with the various terms and the various ways people define them. Even LLM --at what point is it "large"? In a rapidly changing area of both academic and lay understanding, it's understandable for terminology to be a bit unstable. I don't think it's reasonable to say LLMs do reasoning, however. Even when mimicking incredible feats of intelligence, they don't have a grasp of what is true or how truth flows from a set of facts to any other.

otikik 2y ago

It was a marketing trick. LLMs are not AI, the same way that a picture of a man is not a man.