Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence

Comments

• Lemmylefty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  […] in blog posts and videos and published memoirs, autistic teens and young adults described living for a decade or more without any way to communicate, while people around them assumed they were intellectually deficient.

  On a related note… only 5% of hearing parents with a deaf child will learn sign language.

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  • 1stTime4MeInMCU@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That’s awful. I don’t know why sign language isn’t made into an official state language that everyone has to learn some basic amount of proficiency

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    • littlewonder@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Amen! And it would benefit literally everybody. You can communicate across a room or in loud environments. It’s so useful!

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    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Because we only recently stopped telling parents not to teach it to hard of hearing children.

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  • zoe@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    also those parents could be close relatives, so they could fuck up their offspring genome by transferring recessive genes to them from both sides, and thus a recessive phenotype to be expressed, which most of the time is a disability. shouldnt expect much from such parents

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• Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Something trained only on form” — as all LLMs are, by definition — “is only going to get form; it’s not going to get meaning. It’s not going to get to understanding.”

  I had lengthy and intricate conversations with ChatGPT about philosophy and religious concepts. It allowed me to playfully peek into Spinoza’s worldview, with a few errors.

  I have no problem to accept it is form, but cannot deny it conveys meaning as if it understands.

  The article is very opinionated and dismissive in that regard. It even goes so far that it predicts what future research and engineering cannot achieve; untrustworthy.

  We cannot pin down what we even mean with intelligence and meaning. While being way too long, the article doesn’t even mention emergent capabilities, or quote any of the many contrary scientific views.

  Apart from the unnecessarily long anecdotes about autistic and disabled people, did anybody learn anything from this article? I feel it’s an uncritical parroting of what people like to think anyways to feel supreme and secure.

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• Peanutbjelly@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This whole thread is absurd.

  Chatgpt has a form of intelligence depending on your definition of intelligence. It may also be considered conscious in a very alien and undeveloped way. It is definitely not sentient.

  Kind of like having the stochastic word generating part of a brain and nothing else.

  You can still shape it into something capable of intelligent and directed activity.

  People are really bad at accepting the level of nuance necessary for this topic.

  It is useful and fantastic for what it already is. People are just really bad at understanding what it is.

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  • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    A lot of people are deeply invested in the notion that human intelligence is unique and special and impossible to replicate. Either their personal sense of worth is bound up in that notion (see for example many of the artists who get very angry when people call AI generated images "art") or it's simply a threat to their jobs and economic wellbeing. The result is a powerful need to convince themselves that there's a special something that's missing from ChatGPT and its ilk that will "never" be replicated by machines.

    It's true that ChatGPT isn't intelligent in the same way that human brains are intelligent. But it is intelligent, in ways that are useful. And "never" is a bad bet to make for the rest of those capabilities.

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    • irkli@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Based upon what, your feelings?

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• Hextic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

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• unreachable@lemmy.my.id ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  its ability to speak does not make it intelligent

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• housepanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Language makes a poor heuristic for intelligence because language is multidimensional and cannot be easily quantified or qualified. Language is expressed in so many varied way and it is even different between cultures and expressions of language even vary as well. Indeed the article you’re referring to is quite good.

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• fidodo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I view it by building up to the technology.

  Is a book sentient? It is capable of providing recorded knowledge in the form of sequence of symbols on a specific subject at a level of proficiency far above the reader’s. But no, it’s static information that originated from a human.

  Is a library sentient? It allows for systematic retrieval of knowledge on a vast amount of subjects far beyond what any human is capable of knowing. But no, it’s just a static categorization of documents curated by a human.

  Is a search engine sentient? It allows for automatic retrieval of highly relevant knowledge based on a query from a human. But no, it’s just token based pattern matching to find similar documents.

  So why is an LLM suddenly sentient? It’s able to produce highly relevant sequences of words based on recorded knowledge specifically tailored to the sequences of words around it, but it’s just a probability engine to find highly relevant token sequences that match the context around it.

  The underlying mechanism simply has no concept of a world view or a mental model of the metaphysical world around. It’s basically a magic book that allows you to retrieve information from any document ever written in a way tailored to a document you wrote.

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  • Spzi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I can mostly follow, just want to exclude the last paragraph which contains assumptions about a black box.

    That being said, how is the human brain different from what you describe?

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    • fidodo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You think by processing the probabilistic association between word sequences? Humans think through world models, we have imagination, a physical and metaphysical simulation of the world around us. Absolutely none of that is involved in how LLMs work. There’s a lot to be said about the utility of association of knowledge embedded in symbols, and having a magic book that can retrieve pre existing information in context is incredibly useful and I think it will have an impact on the level of the printing press and the internet, but just because it’s incredibly useful at retrieving knowledge doesn’t mean it works anything like how a human brain works.

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• Lorenz_These_Curves@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m shocked, I thought it was sentient!

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• MxM111@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Whatever you call it, it will take people jobs by making them more efficient, and fast.

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• MaxVoltage@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  indeed whales cant speak and are very smart 🧠 /s

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• prototyperspective@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Here are some correlations of language skills and other intelligence factors or evaluations (e.g. IQ) via a study (recently integrated the info into the article: Neurogenetics – language GWAS

  However, I largely agree – see for example this argument / its sources

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• HellAwaits@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Someone should let Destiny know that far-right wingers knowing how to say ‘omniscient’ doesn’t make them a lick of intelligent.

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