We couldn't agree on what intelligence means before ChatGPT happened. Now, agreement on the term seems even further away
If performing well on an IQ test or performing at a high level on knowledge work is intelligence to you, these models are intelligent. If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't have it right now
But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition
> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition
I do recall a couple of decades ago, when the Turing test was discussed as the big goal that seemed so far away. Then LLMs arguably did pass the test, and no one cared about the test anymore.
It hasn’t been passed and no one cares about it because it’s basically an end goal. No lab can hit it so they can’t juice the crazy Turing benchmark 3000 for marketing.
If someone sat me down today with an LLM and a human and both were trying to prove to me they were human, and I can have conversations of arbitrary length, I’d get it right every time.
The test was not "after thousands of hours of conversing with them, knowing they're AI, THEN see if you can tell them apart blindly." Were 2010 you to be in a real turing test with an arbitrary erudite human and a 2026 frontier LLM, not knowing LLMs existed, you'd probably struggle
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> It hasn’t been passed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
From the abstract: "When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant. LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time"
I thought the same then. But the funny thing is that today, it has become a lot easier to recognize the frontier models as not human. All the load bearing and not x but y, etc… weird
This is a tell of LLMs but it's not universal. I use ChatGPT extensively and I don't often get obvious nonsense any more.
I'd figure out that it's an LLM because it's effectively superhuman. Taking that away I'm not so sure I'd be able to tell
> If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't have it right now
Probably. Hopefully.
I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bats exhibit intelligence when they navigate long distances and hunt for food.
I'm not exactly that you mean by "new to the system", but it seems to me that that definition makes a calculator intelligent, which I can't agree with.
It's a continuum, and things very low on the intelligence continuum might not be referred to as intelligent in everyday usage. But many calculators are Turing complete and can thus clearly perform computations that I would consider intelligent. The basic algorithms used by simple calculators to perform arithmetic would be extremely low on the intelligent continuum.
Intelligence isn't a binary property. Is it really a problem to say that a calculator has some intelligence? That it's more intelligent than e.g. a rock?
I agree, but it's clear most people need a definition of intelligence that (1) they qualify for and (2) nothing/no one they don't like qualifies for. And they'll keep redefining intelligence until they satisfy both criteria.