I have no idea. We are unable to prove that other humans are thinking and not just “mimicking intelligence” let alone something we’ve created. People approaching this subject with such certainty are imo being overly confident or outright dishonest.
With respect to what I believe, since you asked, I think there is essentially no reason to distinguish “mimicking intelligence” with high fidelity from “intelligence”. I don’t feel comfortable talking to LLMs as if they were merely machines, but I don’t approach them as if they were human either; they’re in a very weird spot to me. I understand the simplicity of the math and programming behind them probably better than average, but that doesn’t help me come to a conclusion on “thinking”
Other humans can feel emotions, or so you’d believe, but I have no proof of this. All I see is they receive certain input (I call you a shitface) and produce certain output (You punch me in the balls). LLMs can mimic this. But is one of the two more valid than the other? From an observers’ point of view they are the exact same.
Odd example but yes it gets uncertain very quickly. If we discover the mechanism of our own thought it’d be easy enough to apply those rules to the new subject and see if they match or at least look similar. A negative wouldn’t be conclusive, but it’d at least give us something to work with. As it stands right now we just guess, and that guess is essentially guided by bias or at best by the fact that the thing we’re looking at doesn’t appear even remotely similar to anything we’d call “thinking”. This is simply not the case with LLMs (they do a very good job of displaying something that looks like thinking) so our guess is imo even more unsound.
I have no idea. We are unable to prove that other humans are thinking and not just “mimicking intelligence” let alone something we’ve created. People approaching this subject with such certainty are imo being overly confident or outright dishonest.
With respect to what I believe, since you asked, I think there is essentially no reason to distinguish “mimicking intelligence” with high fidelity from “intelligence”. I don’t feel comfortable talking to LLMs as if they were merely machines, but I don’t approach them as if they were human either; they’re in a very weird spot to me. I understand the simplicity of the math and programming behind them probably better than average, but that doesn’t help me come to a conclusion on “thinking”
Other humans can feel emotions, or so you’d believe, but I have no proof of this. All I see is they receive certain input (I call you a shitface) and produce certain output (You punch me in the balls). LLMs can mimic this. But is one of the two more valid than the other? From an observers’ point of view they are the exact same.
Odd example but yes it gets uncertain very quickly. If we discover the mechanism of our own thought it’d be easy enough to apply those rules to the new subject and see if they match or at least look similar. A negative wouldn’t be conclusive, but it’d at least give us something to work with. As it stands right now we just guess, and that guess is essentially guided by bias or at best by the fact that the thing we’re looking at doesn’t appear even remotely similar to anything we’d call “thinking”. This is simply not the case with LLMs (they do a very good job of displaying something that looks like thinking) so our guess is imo even more unsound.