alt Hacker NewsLLMs can be supremely useful but also not intelligent. It might seem like a pointless distinction but the way we talk about these models matters because it impacts how we interact with and understand their outputs.
For example if there’s a strongly held belief that models are independent intelligent entities we’re more likely to lay blame upon them instead of their user. It’s important for the safety discussion too. If they are a new class of life then safety is going to focus on making sure they don’t do bad things. If we instead see them as statistical models we will instead try to make sure people don’t misuse them.
This distinction is even more important today when some of the most powerful people are looking to absolve their crimes by passing them off on their LLMs.
Replies
I don’t think that “independent intelligent entities” or “life” are the relevant categories here. We also want to prevent people from misusing dangerous animals (“life”), and we would still treat “intelligent entities” as things (like machines and computers) if we aren’t convinced they also have sentience and free agency (which are orthogonal to intelligence).
See you've setup a particular set of biases on what intelligence is and put them into nice little binary boxes that don't exist.
Please show me any scientific consensus that shows an AI cannot be an independent intelligent agent? You will find this is impossible to do.
Current LLMs are really more like kids. They don't have startup independence, but they do have more than enough agency to fund themselves in neat, exciting, and dangerous situations.
And mark my words, someone will make an LLM that runs an agent when you execute the model. With enough capabilities it will become sovereign AI, no longer under human control and spreading itself around under its own 'will'.
For example if there’s a strongly held belief that models are independent intelligent entities we’re more likely to lay blame upon them instead of their user.
This sentence, to me, illustrates a great example of why it's so hard to talk about this stuff. That is, this seems to strongly link notions of "intelligent" and "independent" (or maybe the word "autonomous" could also be used there). And a lot of people do seem to make an implicit assumption about the link between those two attributes. OTOH, I take it almost for granted that "intelligence" and "independence" (or "autonomy") are things that are "related but orthogonal". That is, I don't see that "intelligence implies independence". And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who sees things that way. So we have to fairly different fundamental worldviews expressed here. And that's just one example of how these discussions go wonky. :-)