I think the "LLM is intelligence" crowd has a very simplistic view of people. If you feel that natural language and the systems responsible it are pretty much the only things that human intelligence produces, then I can see the argument.
But I don't believe that. That a machine that can produce convincing human-language chains of thought says nothing about its "intelligence". Back when basic RNNs/LSTMs were at the forefront of ML research, no one had any delusions about this fact. And just because you can train a token prediction model on all of human knowledge (which the internet is not) doesn't mean the model understands anything.
It's surprising to me that the people most knowledgeable about the models often appear to be the biggest believers - perhaps they're self-interestedly pumping a valuation or are simply obsessed with the idea of building something straight from the science fiction stories they grew up with.
In the end though, the burden of proof is on the believers, not the deniers.
> It's surprising to me that the people most knowledgeable about the models often appear to be the biggest believers - perhaps they're self-interestedly pumping a valuation or are simply obsessed with the idea of building something straight from the science fiction stories they grew up with.
"Believer" really is the most appropriate label here. Altman or Musk lying and pretending they "AGI" right around the corner to pump their stocks is to be expected. The actual knowledgeable making completely irrational claims is simply incomprehensible beyond narcissism and obscurantism.
Interestingly, those who argue against the fiction that current models are reasoning, are using reason to make their points. A non-reasoning system generating plausible text is not at all a mystery can be explained, therefore, it's not sufficient for a system to generate plausible text to qualify as reasoning.
Those who are hyping the emergence of intelligence out of statistical models of written language on the other hand rely strictly on the basest empiricism, e.g. "I have an interaction with ChatGPT that proves it's intelligent" or "I put your argument into ChatGPT and here's what it said, isn't that interestingly insightful". But I don't see anyone coming out with any reasoning on how ability to reason could emerge out of a system predicting text.
There's also a tacit connection made between those language models being large and complex and their supposed intelligence. The human brain is large and complex, and it's the material basis of human intelligence, "therefore expensivelarge language models with internal behavior completely unexplainable to us, must be intelligent".
I don't think it will, but if the release of the deepseek models effectively shifts the main focus towards efficiency as opposed to "throwing more GPUs at it", that will also force the field to produce models with the current behavior using only the bare minimum, both in terms of architecture and resources. That would help against some aspects of the mysticism.
The biggest believers are not the best placed to drive the research forward. They are not looking at it critically and trying to understand it. They are using every generated sentence as a confirmation of their preconceptions. If the most knowledgeable are indeed the biggest believers, we are in for a long dark (mystic) AI winter.
But I don't believe that. That a machine that can produce convincing human-language chains of thought says nothing about its "intelligence". Back when basic RNNs/LSTMs were at the forefront of ML research, no one had any delusions about this fact. And just because you can train a token prediction model on all of human knowledge (which the internet is not) doesn't mean the model understands anything.
It's surprising to me that the people most knowledgeable about the models often appear to be the biggest believers - perhaps they're self-interestedly pumping a valuation or are simply obsessed with the idea of building something straight from the science fiction stories they grew up with.
In the end though, the burden of proof is on the believers, not the deniers.