You Should Know

'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. 🤷

I remember when “heuristics” were all the rage. Frankly that’s what LLMs are, advanced heuristics. “Intelligence” is nothing more than marketing bingo.

"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.

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.

I can't wait to see what A2 can do!

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

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?

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.

Both that and LLMs fall under the umbrella of machine learning, but they branch in different directions. LLMs are optimized for generating language, while the systems used in drug discovery focus on pattern recognition, prediction, and simulations. Same foundation - different tools for different jobs.