alt Hacker NewsInteresting to me is the tension between remarks along the lines that this post maybe made sense in 2023, but not today, or how LLMs clearly show intelligence by solving Navier-Stokes, et cetera; versus the comments I read here often as well: "it's just a tool".
I can't quite put my finger on it, but aren't these two statements add odds with each other? Intelligence is hard to define, consciousness even more so, but wouldn't "intelligence" imply some sort of agency? If not, I'd argue computers were intelligent long before the age of LLMs. And likewise, doesn't a tool imply the lack of intelligence and agency, even if the tool's function is very elaborate?
I got the impression that both these statements are made by the same people, or at least people with similar takes on AI. Is that wrong and there are "intelligence" and "tool" factions? Or do people disagree with my assumption and there's nothing wrong with the concept of "intelligent tools"?
Kinda refreshing this discussion, compared to the builder vs. tinkerer debates, imo.
I would think the intelligence aspect is a bit hard to define, but to my mind (having called LLMs tools before), the main utility of a tool is reliability.
Given a certain world state (including a tool's internal state), its effects back on the world state (as initiated by me) are at some leve of description understandable, expected and repeatable. Swing hammer, drive nail into wood. Make slicing motion with knife, cut meat. Type ' find /path/to/some/dir -name "keyword"', find files with keyword. Point harness at codebase with prompt 'fix bug X', actually fix bug X.
All these examples are at some level of description incredibly complex (think of all particles interacting at the (sub-)atomic level even when using a hammer to only drive a nail into some wood), and of course all the electrons flowing through the GPUs doing matrix multiplications in order to fix bug X, but at some level of description (the one I just used) they are also incredibly simple and understandable.
Intelligence is rather nebulous (and as used by OpenAI/Anthropic, quite threatening), but I don't think this definition of a tool precludes it to be "intelligent". They feel more orthogonal. The intelligence (or perhaps capability) feels like it is related to the size of the chunk of the world state that it can take into account and affect, while still resulting in understandable, expected and repeatable effects. LLMs, when properly harnessed, are pretty great at this currently and we are still discovering what they are consistently capable of.
Calling harnessed LLMs tools is perhaps also a more grounding frame specifically to counter-act the anthropomorphizing framing that OpenAI and Anthropic consistently go for in their game of AI-doom-chicken talk. The tool framing is in that sense maybe a (self-)jedi-mind-trick.