In defense of people who say LLMs are not intelligent: they probably mean to say they are not sapient, and I think they're loosely correct if you consider the literal word "intelligent" to have a different meaning from the denotative "Intelligence" in the context of Artificial Intelligence.
'Intelligence' requires understanding, understanding requires awareness. This is not seen in anything called "AI", not today at least, but maybe not ever. Again, why not use a different word, one that actually applies to these advanced calculators? Expecting the best out of humanity, it may be because of the appeal of the added pizzazz and the excitement that comes with it or simple semantic confusion... but seeing the people behind it all, it probably is so the dummies get overly excited and buy stuff/make these bots integral parts of their lives. 🤷
The term "Artificial Intelligence" has been around for a long time, 25 years ago AI was an acceptable name for NPC logic in videogames. Arguably that's still the case, and personally I vastly prefer "Artificial Intelligence" to "Broad Simulation Of Common Sense Powered By Von Neumann Machines".
“Understanding requires awareness” isn’t some settled fact - it’s just something you’ve asserted. There’s plenty of debate around what understanding even is, especially in AI, and awareness or consciousness is not a prerequisite in most definitions. Systems can model, translate, infer, and apply concepts without being “aware” of anything - just like humans often do things without conscious thought.
You don’t need to be self-aware to understand that a sentence is grammatically incorrect or that one molecule binds better than another. It’s fine to critique the hype around AI - a lot of it is overblown - but slipping in homemade definitions like that just muddies the waters.
Do you think "AI" KNOWS/UNDERSTANDS what a grammatically incorrect sentence is or what molecules even are? How?
Do most humans understand what molecules are? How?
Everything I know about molecules I got from textbooks. Am I just regurgitating my "training data" without understanding? How does one really understand molecules?
You’re moving the goalposts. First you claimed understanding requires awareness, now you’re asking whether an AI knows what a molecule is - as if that’s even the standard for functional intelligence.
No, AI doesn’t “know” things the way a human does. But it can still reliably identify ungrammatical sentences or predict molecular interactions based on training data. If your definition of “understanding” requires some kind of inner experience or conscious grasp of meaning, then fine. But that’s a philosophical stance, not a technical one.
The point is: you don’t need subjective awareness to model relationships in data and produce useful results. That’s what modern AI does, and that's enough to call it intelligent in the functional sense - whether or not it “knows” anything in the way you'd like it to.
I remember when “heuristics” were all the rage. Frankly that’s what LLMs are, advanced heuristics. “Intelligence” is nothing more than marketing bingo.
Usually the reason we want people to stop calling LLMs AI is because there has been a giant marketing machine constructed designed to (and successfully) tricking laymen into believing that LLMs are adjacent to and one tiny breakthrough away from becoming AGI.
From another angle, your statement that AI is not a specific term is correct. Why, then, should we keep using it in common parlance when it just serves to confuse laymen? Let's just use the more specific terms.
So... not intelligent. In the sense that when someone without enough knowledge of computers and/or LLMs hears "LLM is intelligent" and sees "an LLM tells me X", they will be likely to believe that X is true, and not without a reason. Exactly this is my main reason against all the use of intelligence-related terms. When spoken by knowledgeable people who do know the difference - yeah, I am all for that. But first we need to cut the crap of advertisement and hype
"Intelligent" is itself a highly unspecific term which covers quite a lot of different things.
What you're think is "reasoning" or "rationalizing", and LLMs can't do that at all.
However what LLMs (and most Machine Learning implementations) can do is "pattern matching" which is also an element of intelligence: it's what gives us and most animals the ability to recognize things such as food or predators without actually thinking about it (you just see, say, a cat, and you know without thinking that it's a cat even though cats don't all look the same), plus in humans it's also what's behind intuition.
PS: Way back since when they were invented over 3 decades ago, Neural Networks and other Machine Learning technologies were already very good at finding patterns in their training data - often better than humans.
The evolution of the technology has added to it the capability of creating content which follows those patterns, giving us things like LLMs or image generation.
However what has been made clear by LLMs is that using patterns alone (plus a little randomness to vary the results) in generating textual content is not enough to create useful content beyond entertainment, and that's exactly because LLMs can't rationalize. However, the original pattern matching stuff without the content generation is still widely used and very successfully so, in things from OCR to image recognition.
And "intelligence" itself isn't very well defined either. So the only word that remains is "artificial", and we can agree on that.
I usually try to avoid the word "AI". I'll say "LLM" if I talk about chatbots, ChatGPT etc. Or I use the term "machine learning" when broadly speaking about the concept of computers learning and doing such things. It's not exactly the same thing, though. But when reading other people's texts I always think of LLMs when they say AI, because that's currently what they mean almost every time. And AGI is more sci-fi as of now, so it needs some disclaimers and context anyway.
In computer science, the term AI at its simplest just refers to a system capable of performing any cognitive task typically done by humans.
That said, you’re right in the sense that when people say “AI” these days, they almost always mean generative AI - not AI in the broader sense.
Yeah, generative AI is a good point.
I'm not sure with the computer scientists, though. It's certainly not any task, that'd be AGI. And it's not necessarily connected to humans either. Sure they're the prime example of intelligence (whatever it is). But I think a search engine is AI as well, depending how it's laid out. And text to speech, old-school expert systems. A thermostat that controls your heating with a machine learning model might count as well, I'm not sure about that. And that's not really like human cognitive tasks. Closer to curve fitting, than anything else. The thermostat includes problem-solving, learning, perception, knowledge, and planning and decision making. But on the human intelligence score it wouldn't even be a thing that compares.
It’s certainly not any task, that’d be AGI.
Any individual task I mean. Not every task.
Yeah, I'd say some select tasks. And it's not really the entire distinction. I can do math equations with my cognitive capabilities. My pocket calculator can do the same, yet it's not AI. So the definition has to be something else. And AI can do tasks I cannot do. Like go through large amounts of data. Or find patterns a human can not find. So it's not really tied to specific things we do. But a generalized form of intelligence, and I don't think that's well defined or humans are the comparison. They're more a stand-in measurement scale. But I don't think that's what it's about.
Edit: And I'd question the entire usefulness of such a definition. ChatGPT can write very professional-looking text and things that pass as Wikipedia articles. A 5-year-old human can't do that. However the average 5yo can make a sandwich. Now try that with ChatGPT and tell me what that tells about their intelligence. It doesn't really fit as a definition because it's kind of too broad and ill-defined and humans can do a wide variety of tasks and slight differences in focus changes everything around into its opposite.
Most definitions are imperfect - that’s why I said the term AI, at its simplest, refers to a system capable of performing any cognitive task typically done by humans. Doing things faster, or even doing things humans can’t do at all, doesn’t conflict with that definition.
Humans are unarguably generally intelligent, so it’s only natural that we use “human-level intelligence” as the benchmark when talking about general intelligence. But personally, I think that benchmark is a red herring. Even if an AI system isn’t any smarter than we are, its memory and processing capabilities would still be vastly superior. That alone would allow it to immediately surpass the “human-level” threshold and enter the realm of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).
As for something like making a sandwich - that’s a task for robotics, not AI. We’re talking about cognitive capabilities here.
Yeah, you're right. I think we can circle back to your original post, which stated the term is unspecific. However, I don't think that makes sense in computer science, or natural science in general. The way I learned is: you always start out with definitions. And mathematical, concise and waterproof ones, because they need to be internally consistent and you then base an entire building on top of it. And that just collapses if the foundation isn't there. And maths starts to show weird quirks. So the computer scientists need a proper definition anyway. But that doesn't stop us using the same word for a different, imperfect one in every day talk. I think they're not the same, though.
I'm not sure about the robotics. Some people say intelligence is inherently linked to interacting with the real world. And that it isn't a thing in isolation. So that would mean an AI would need to be able to manipulate the real world. You're certainly right that can be done without robotics and limited to text and pictures on a screen. But I think ultimately it's the same thing. And multimodal models can in fact use almost the same mechanisms they use to process and manipulate image and text, and apply it to movements and navigate 3D space. I'd argue robotics is the same side of the same coin.
And it's similar for humans. I use the same brain and roughly similar mechanics that enable me to do it, whether I learn a natural science, or when I learn dancing moves or become a good basketball player. I'd argue that's manifestations of the same thing. Also requires knowledge, decision making... And that'd make a professional dancer "intelligent" in a similar way. I'm not sure if that's an accepted way to think of it, though.
To add to the confusion, you also have people out there thinking it's "Al" or "A1". It's a real mess.
I can't wait to see what A2 can do!
We've been waiting for that since 1824!
Really? Like the steak sauce? I guess I should have seen that coming since the 00s motorcycle communities keep asking about their F1 light. Fuel 1njection
Nobody in a position of any importance, just the US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
I still think intelligence is a marketing term or simply a misnomer. It's basically an advanced calculator. Intelligence questions, creates rules from nothing, transforms raw data from reality into ideas, has its own volition... And the same goes for a chess engine, of course, it's just more visible because it's not spitting out text but chess moves. Intelligence and consciousness don't seem to be computational processes.
I could follow everything you said up until the conclusion. If consciousness is not computational, then what is going on in our brains instead? I know of course that even neuroscientists don't know exactly, but just in broad principle. I always thought our brains are still doing computation, just with a different method to computers. I don't mean to be contrarian, I'm just genuenly curious what other kind of process could support consciousness?
I'm not gonna claim to 'know' things here, and I'm too groggy to even attempt to give you a satisfying answer but: applied formal logic as seen in any machine based on logic gates is just an expression/replication of simplified thought and not a copy of our base mental processes. The mind understands truths that cannot even be formalized or derived, such as axiomatic truths. Even if something can be understood and predicted, it doesn't mean the process could be written down in code. It certainly isn't today...
My understanding of the topic is closer to Roger Penrose's postulates so please check this wiki page and maybe watch a couple of vids on the topic, I'm just a peasant with a hunch when it comes to "AI". 🤷
You’re describing intelligence more like a soul than a system - something that must question, create, and will things into existence. But that’s a human ideal, not a scientific definition. In practice, intelligence is the ability to solve problems, generalize across contexts, and adapt to novel inputs. LLMs and chess engines both do that - they just do it without a sense of self.
A calculator doesn’t qualify because it runs "fixed code" with no learning or generalization. There's no flexibility to it. It can't adapt.
Not just human but many other animals too, the only group of entities we have ever used the term 'intelligence' for. It could be an entirely physical process, sure (doesn't imply replication but at least holds a hopeful possibility). I'm not gonna lie and say I understand the ins and outs of these bots, I'm definitely more ignorant on the subject than not, but I don't see how the word intelligence applies in earnest here. Handheld calculators are programmed to "solve problems" based on given rules too... dynamic code and other advances don't change the fact that they're the same logic-gate machine at their core. Having said that, I'm sure they have their uses (idk if they're worth harming the planet for them with the amount of energy they consume!), I'm just not the biggest fan of the semantics.
There's also a philosophical definition, which I think is hotly contested so depending on your school of thought your belief of is LLM AI can vary. Usually many people take issue with the thought over questions like does it have a mind, think, or have consciousness?
AGI itself has been made up as a marketing term by LLM companies.
Let's not forget that the official definition of AGI is that it can make 200 billion dollars.
The term AGI was first used in 1997 by Mark Avrum Gubrud in an article named ‘Nanotechnology and international security’
By advanced artificial general intelligence, I mean AI systems that rival or surpass the human brain in complexity and speed, that can acquire, manipulate and reason with general knowledge, and that are usable in essentially any phase of industrial or military operations where a human intelligence would otherwise be needed. Such systems may be modeled on the human brain, but they do not necessarily have to be, and they do not have to be “conscious” or possess any other competence that is not strictly relevant to their application. What matters is that such systems can be used to replace human brains in tasks ranging from organizing and running a mine or a factory to piloting an airplane, analyzing intelligence data or planning a battle.
That is true, but it was a term narrowly and incoherently used by scientists. In fact, that one paper used it, and it took ten years for it to be picked up again, again by just a few academic papers. Even the academic community preferred terms like "strong AI" before the current hype.
AGI was not a term that was used to refer to a concept, it had to be explained by each and every article that mentioned it, it was not a general term that had a strict meaning attached to it. It was brought to that level by Google/Deepmind employees two years ago, and then got into the place where every second Medium article is buzzwording around with it when it became a corporate target for OpenAI/Microsoft.
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