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omnicognateyesterday at 1:25 AM1 replyview on HN

I have never claimed that only people/machines that can do frontier maths research can be intelligent. (Though someone always responds as if I did.)

I said that a machine doing frontier maths research would be sufficient evidence to convince me that it is intelligent. My prior is very strongly that LLM's do not think like humans so I require compelling evidence to conclude that they do. I defined one such possible piece of evidence, and didn't exclude the possibility of others.

If I were to encounter such evidence and be persuaded, I would have to also consider it likely that LLMs employ their intelligence when solving IMO questions and generating code. However, those tasks alone are not sufficient to persuade me of their intelligence because I think there are ways of performing those tasks without human-like insight (by interpolating/recombining from vast training data).

As I said elsewhere in this thread:

> The special thing about novel mathematical thinking is that it is verifiable, requires genuine insight and is a text generation task, not that you have to be able to do it to be considered intelligent.


Replies

tim333yesterday at 10:13 AM

I know what you mean but was just thinking people vary a lot in their requirements as to what they will accept as thinking. People show a kid a photo and say what's that and they say I think it's a dog and that's taken as evidence of thinking. With AI people want it to win a Nobel prize or something.

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