alt Hacker NewsThere's a funny sort of gerrymandering of "intelligence". People like to subtract the capabilities of AI from the capabilities of humans, and define what remains as "intelligence" to make us feel good about ourselves.
Suppose I set up a server which runs an LLM agent in a while loop, telling it something like: "Make me a bunch of money" on repeat. Fair to say that the server+LLM system, taken as a whole, is now an intelligent agent?
Time to come up with a new gerrymander perhaps?
> Fair to say that the server+LLM system, taken as a whole, is now an intelligent agent?
No, it is not. It is a tool repeating a set of instructions you passed to it, if it ends up blowing up a hospital or hiring a gunman on the dark web, it is an accident, but one that’s your responsibility for giving it access to such resources and the go-ahead to implement whatever plan its tokens land on. There’s no intelligence involved whatsoever, especially considering how sycophantic these models tend to be.
If one day an LLM suddenly, without any prompting or user interaction whatsoever (including activation), decides to spin itself up and go rogue, then the conversation of “intelligence” might start to make sense, but at the moment it doesn’t.
An Android phone isn’t “intelligent” just because some marketing team decided to call it a “smart” phone.