zlacker

While it's debatable whether slime molds showcase intelligence, there's a substantial difference between its behavior and modern AI systems. The organism was never trained to traverse a maze. It simply behaves in the same way as it would in its natural habitat, seeking out food in this case, which we interpret as "solving" a human-made problem. In order to get an AI system to do the same we would have to "train" it on large amounts of data that specifically included maze solving. This training wouldn't carry over any other type of problem, for which we would also need to specifically train it on.

When you consider how humans and other animals learn, knowledge is carried over. I.e. if we learn how to solve a maze on paper, we can carry this knowledge over to solve a hedge maze. It's a contrived example, but you get the idea. When we learn, we build out a web of ideas in our minds which we can later use while thinking to solve other types of problems, or the same problems in different ways. This is a sign of intelligence that modern AI systems simply don't have. They're showing an illusion of intelligence, which as I've said before, can still be very useful.

>>imiric+(OP)
My alternative definition would be something like this. Intelligence is the capacity to solve problems, where a problem is defined contextually. This means that what is and is not intelligence is negotiable in situations where the problem itself is negotiable. If you have water solve a maze, then yes the water could be said to have intelligence, though that would be a silly way to put it. It’s more that intelligence is a material phenomenon, and things which seem like they should be incredibly stupid can demonstrate surprisingly intelligent behavior.

LLMs are leagues ahead of viruses or proteins or water. If you put an LLM into a code editor with access to error messages, it can solve a problem you create for it, much like water flowing through a maze. Does it learn or change? No, everything is already there in the structure of the LLM. Does it have agency? No, it’s a transparently deterministic mapping from input to output. Can it demonstrate intelligent behavior? Yes.

>>Briggy+yP
That's an interesting way of looking at it, though I do disagree. Mainly because, as you mention, it would be silly to claim that water is intelligent if it can be used to solve a problem. That would imply that any human-made tool is intelligent, which is borderline absurd.

This is why I think it's important that if we're going to call these tools intelligent, then they must follow the processes that humans do to showcase that intelligence. Scoring high on a benchmark is not a good indicator of this, in the same way that a human scoring high on a test isn't. It's just one convenient way we have of judging this, and a very flawed one at that.

Anyway, cheers for the discussion!