The Timmy Trap - Hackdot

Re:The Timmy Trap by tkiolp4 on Friday August 15, 2025 @05:50PM (#44917656)

I think LLMs are not intelligent because they aren’t designed to be intelligent, whatever the definition of intelligence is. They are designed to predict text, to mimic. We could argue if predicting text or mimicking is intelligence, but first and foremost LLMs are coded to predict text and our current definition of intelligence afaik is not only the ability to predict text.

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Re:The Timmy Trap by andrewla on Friday August 15, 2025 @05:58PM (#44917727)

In the framework above it sounds like you're not willing to concede the dichotomy.

If your argument is that only things made in the image of humans can be intelligent (i.e. #1), then it just seems like it's too narrow a definition to be useful.

If there's a larger sense in which some system can be intelligent (i.e. #2), then by necessity this can't rely on the "implementation or learning model".

What is the third alternative that you're proposing? That the intent of the designer must be that they wanted to make something intelligent?

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Re:The Timmy Trap by rsanek on Friday August 15, 2025 @05:57PM (#44917721)

humans were designed to be intelligent?

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Re:The Timmy Trap by tkiolp4 on Friday August 15, 2025 @06:32PM (#44918051)

I don’t know that. But LLMs were not designed to be intelligent… among other things because we don’t know what intelligence is. So, if a) we don’t know how to define intelligence and b) we design a thing (llms) in order to predict text, then why would we claim that that thing is intelligent? The only thing we can claim is that they predict text.

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Re:The Timmy Trap by keeda on Friday August 15, 2025 @07:13PM (#44918353)

I think the GP's point was that we humans consider ourselves intelligent, but we evolved and clearly weren't designed to be intelligent. One could even say that our intelligence was... "emergent".

Furthermore, our history is full of instances where we invented something that a) we didn't understand and b) had uses way beyond what we intended. As a recent example, GLP-1 was intended for glucouse regulation but is now basically a wonder drug that can treat a bunch of issues ranging from obesity to addiction, inflammation, dementia, fertility and more.

Given we don't know how to define intelligence, I think it's fine to apply some "duck typing" here.

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