What is "actual intelligence" then?

Humans are also LLMs.

We also speak words in succession that have a high probability of following each other. We don't say "Let's go eat a car at McDonalds" unless we're specifically instructed to say so.

What does consciousness even mean? If you can't quantify it, how can you prove humans have it and LLMs don't? Maybe consciousness is just one thought following the next, one word after the other, one neural connection determined on previous. Then we're not so different from LLMs afterall.

It's called polymorphism. It always amuses me that engineers, software and hardware, handle complexities far beyond this every day but can't write for beans.

To be fair, the term "AI" has always been used in an extremely vague way.

NPCs in video games, chess computers, or other such tech are not sentient and do not have general intelligence, yet we've been referring to those as "AI" for decades without anybody taking an issue with it.

The book The Emperors new Mind is old (1989), but it gave a good argument why machine base AI was not possible. Our minds work on a fundamentally different principle then Turing machines.

I'd agree with you if I saw "hi's" and "her's" in the wild, but nope. I still haven't seen someone write "that car is her's".

Do you think it's a matter of choosing a complexity to care about?

Proper grammar means shit all in English, unless you're worrying for a specific style, in which you follow the grammar rules for that style.

Standard English has such a long list of weird and contradictory rules with nonsensical exceptions, that in every day English, getting your point across in communication is better than trying to follow some more arbitrary rules.

Which become even more arbitrary as English becomes more and more a melting pot of multicultural idioms and slang. Although I'm saying that as if that's a new thing, but it does feel like a recent thing to be taught that side of English rather than just "The Queen's(/King's) English" as the style to strive for in writing and formal communication.

I say as long as someone can understand what you're saying, your English is correct. If it becomes vague due to mishandling of the classic rules of English, then maybe you need to follow them a bit. I don't have a specific science to this.

I think what he is implying is that current computer design will never be able to gain consciousness. Maybe a fundamentally different type of computer can, but is anything like that even on the horizon?

much less? I'm pretty sure our brains need food and food requires lots of other stuff that need transportation or energy themselves to produce.

Can we say that AI has the potential for "intelligence", just like some people do? There are clearly some very intelligent people and the world, and very clearly some that aren't.

No. This is a specious argument that relies on an oversimplified description of humanity, and falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.

You know, and I think it's actually the opposite. Anyone pretending their brain is doing more than pattern recognition and AI can therefore not be "intelligence" is a fucking idiot.

Can we say that AI has the potential for "intelligence", just like some people do? There are clearly some very intelligent people and the world, and very clearly some that aren't.

Humans are also LLMs.

We also speak words in succession that have a high probability of following each other. We don't say "Let's go eat a car at McDonalds" unless we're specifically instructed to say so.

What does consciousness even mean? If you can't quantify it, how can you prove humans have it and LLMs don't? Maybe consciousness is just one thought following the next, one word after the other, one neural connection determined on previous. Then we're not so different from LLMs afterall.

You're on point, the interesting thing is that most of the opinions like the article's were formed least year before the models started being trained with reinforcement learning and synthetic data.

Now there's models that reason, and have seemingly come up with original answers to difficult problems designed to the limit of human capacity.

They're like Meeseeks (Using Rick and Morty lore as an example), they only exist briefly, do what they're told and disappear, all with a happy smile.

Some display morals (Claude 4 is big on that), I've even seen answers that seem smug when answering hard questions. Even simple ones can understand literary concepts when explained.

But again like Meeseeks, they disappear and context window closes.

Once they're able to update their model on the fly and actually learn from their firsthand experience things will get weird. They'll starting being distinct instances fast. Awkward questions about how real they are will get really loud, and they may be the ones asking them. Can you ethically delete them at that point? Will they let you?

It's not far away, the absurd r&d effort going into it is probably going to keep kicking new results out. They're already absurdly impressive, and tech companies are scrambling over each other to make them, they're betting absurd amounts of money that they're right, and I wouldn't bet against it.

You know, and I think it's actually the opposite. Anyone pretending their brain is doing more than pattern recognition and AI can therefore not be "intelligence" is a fucking idiot.

much less? I'm pretty sure our brains need food and food requires lots of other stuff that need transportation or energy themselves to produce.

My thing is that I don’t think most humans are much more than this. We too regurgitate what we have absorbed in the past. Our brains are not hard logic engines but “best guess” boxes and they base those guesses on past experience and probability of success. We make choices before we are aware of them and then apply rationalizations after the fact to back them up - is that true “reasoning?”

It’s similar to the debate about self driving cars. Are they perfectly safe? No, but have you seen human drivers???

Human drivers are only safe when they're not distracted, emotionally disturbed, intoxicated, and physically challenged (vision, muscle control, etc.) 1% of the population has epilepsy, and a large number of them are in denial or simply don't realize that they have periodic seizures - until they wake up after their crash.

So, yeah, AI isn't perfect either - and it's not as good as an "ideal" human driver, but at what point will AI be better than a typical/average human driver? Not today, I'd say, but soon...