When people claim artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and thus threaten humanity with extinction, they seem to be referring specif

Enough about the AI Apocalypse Already

submited by

Style Pass

2023-06-03 06:30:03

When people claim artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and thus threaten humanity with extinction, they seem to be referring specifically to advances made with large language models.

As I understand them, large language models are probability machines that have ingested massive amounts of text scraped from the Internet. They answer questions based on the probability of one series of words (their answer) following another series of words (the question).

It seems like a stretch to call this intelligence, but if we accept that definition then it follows that this kind of intelligence is nothing remotely like human intelligence, which makes the claim that it will surpass human intelligence confusing. Hasn’t this kind of machine learning surpassed us decades ago?

Or when we say “surpass” does that simply refer to fooling people into thinking an AI machine is a human via conversation? That is an important milestone, but I’m not ready to accept the turing test as proof of equal intelligence.