We've chosen to call Deep Blue and Half-Life 1 NPCs "AI" too.

It boggles my mind that this "b-b-but it's not actual real AI" whine is even a thing. Were people saying this living in the cave for the past 5 decades of AI research?

What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing.

"Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. Everyone's got some idea what it is, so you get lots of different angles, but no one has an Intelligence Ruler we can hold up to a text output and say, yep, this one's got an INT of 14.

Seems to be the crux of the disagreement.

> It turned out to be possible with fairly basic statistical text generation, because fooling humans is easy.

I don't think it is fair to call a GPT model "fairly basic statistical text generation" - a Markov Text Generator I'd agree can be called basic statistics, but they are not fooling any humans in a Turing test.

> It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning.

No, AI would absolutely be apt for describing a computing reasoning like a child

> It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning.

We've called that "AGI" since the late 90s/early 00s (depending on whether you count first use or popularization). Even if AGI does come to pass, we'll still need "AI" since not all forms of AI will be AGI.

>but these aren't autonomous intelligences

Well, the labs are in a weird bind. They need to keep increasing autonomy so the agents can do increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks. But at the same time, they're closely guarding against autonomy in the sense of "pursuing its own goals."

Over the past year and a half especially, several labs have mentioned adding safeguards against self-replication, resistance to shutdown etc. (Notably, shortly after they all started bragging about involving them in the AI training loop itself, i.e. "self-improvement".)

My point here is that the autonomy of which you seek might be only a few small mutations away, but the labs are actively working to prevent such a mutation. I don't expect that situation to last for very long.

Not that I expect an AI lab will be overtaken by a rogue intelligence any time soon, but that as the cost of training goes down, I expect more "open minded" organizations and individuals to become involved.

It only takes one.

That's going to be the beginning of a new era of biology, and it's a little unsettling to think about.

> It would've been nice to reserve "AI" for superior human-like intelligence capable of genuine common sense and reasoning.

What would a frontier API have to be able to do to satisfy you?

The field has been called Artificial Intelligence for what, 60 plus years now. Why is it a problem now?

Oh, you're talking about "AGI"! In the 90's we started using the term, you should catch up!

This no news for people who study philosophy, as it was known since the 1980s when John Searle described the Chinese room thought experiment.

Even Turing him self did envision the Turing test as something to pass as intelligence, but rather as a more useful replacement for the troubled term.

That said, I think your quest is doomed. There will never be a superior human-like intelligence. Forever is a long time, but my reasoning for believing this is the same reason Turing offered a replacement. Intelligence is way too vague to be useful as a measurement for anything. And if we ever discover something that is more intelligent them humans (by whichever definition of intelligence) we will simply redefine intelligence to exclude that.

I don't think you can say the Turing test has been passed in a computer versus determined humans setting. IE humans making a strategy effort to sort humans versus computers as well as humans motivated to distinguish themselves as humans, IE, people quiz the person or machine about "common sense, reasoning, etc." and people make an effort to exhibit that reasoning. I'd concede that creating such a competition would be challenging.

I find references to LLMs fooling humans in "casual conversations" [1] but that's not how I think the original Turing test was conceived - or at least that's not all versions that existed.

At the same time, before even LLMs appeared, the exact meaning of the test was under intense debate. The "Loebner Prize" [2] being awarded to fairly simple chatbots made serious computer scientists very embarrassed.

[1] https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-passes-turing-test-30733/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize

We're choosing to call LLMs (and the little "harness" programs that query them in loops and execute their output) "AI", even though it doesn't make much sense.

They fucking solve original math problems that you can't solve. They are indisputably intelligent, and they are indisputably artificial. That makes them indisputably "artificial intelligence." Denying that (or downvoting it, for that matter) is up there with denying evolution and the Moon landings.

It's time to start flying a different flag. You're making humans look stupid.

It turned out to be possible with fairly basic statistical text generation, because fooling humans is easy.

Yes, fooling humans is easy. Yet somehow we still consider ourselves qualified to say what is "intelligent" and what isn't, even though we can't seem to define the term.