LLMs being intelligence or not is not really that interesting. It's just matter of how you define intelligence. It matters maybe to the AI CEOs and their investors because of marketing.

What matters is how useful LLMs actually are. Many people here say it is useful as advanced search engine and not that useful as your coworker. That is very useful but most likely not something the AI companies want to hear.

> You’d need a very no-true-Scotsmanned definition of intelligence to be able exclude LLMs.

The thing is, that intelligence is an anthropocentric term. And has always been defined in a no-true-Scotsman way. When we describe the intelligence of other species we do so in extremely human terms (except for dogs). For example we consider dolphins smart when we see them play with each other, talk to each other, etc. We consider chimpanzees when we see them use a tool, row a boat, etc. We don’t consider an ant colony smart when they optimize a search for food sources, only because humans don’t normally do that. The only exception here are dogs, who we consider smart when they obey us more easily.

Personally, my take on this is that intelligence is not a useful term in philosophy nor science. Describing a behavior as intelligent is kind of like calling a small creature a bug. It is useful in our day to day speech, but fails when we want to build any theory around it.

In the context of "AI", the use of the word "intelligence" has referred to human-comparable intelligence for at least the last 75 years, when Alan Turing described the Turing Test. That test was explicitly intended to test for a particular kind of human equivalent intelligence. No other animal has come close to passing the Turing Test. As such, the distinction you're referring to isn't relevant to this discussion.

> Personally, my take on this is that intelligence is not a useful term in philosophy nor science.

Hot take.

The Turing test was debunked by John Searle in 1980 with the Chinese room thought experiment. And even looking past that, the existence, and the pervasiveness, of the Turing test proves my point that this term is and always has been extremely anthropocentric.

In statistics there has been a prevailing consensus for a really long time that artificial intelligence is not only a misnomer, but also rather problematic, and maybe even confusing. There has been a concerted effort the past 15 years to move away from this term onto something like machine learning (machine learning is not without its own set of downsides, but is still miles better then AI). So honestly my take is not that hot (at least not in statistics; maybe in psychology and philosophy).

But I want to justify my take in psychology. Psychometricians have been doing intelligence testing for well over a century now, and the science is not much further along then it was a century ago. No new prediction, no new subfields, etc. This is a hallmark of a scientific dead end. And on the flip side, psychological theories that don‘t use intelligence at all are doing just fine.