The best non technical explanation you can give is "An AI agent is an LLM that can take actions".
While an agent doesn't necessarily have to be powered by an LLM, most modern AI agents are.
You pointing at a human brain does not change that an AI agent is not intelligent and cannot think, we are still talking about probability built on statistics with extra steps.
I am not trying to be dishonest, we should stop making analogies between AI and actual thinking, because they are two entire different concepts.
Who developed these technologies used the words "thinking" and "reasoning", this does not mean they are actually thinking and reasoning. Somewhere you still have a processor calculating, with no empathy.
So, again: stop humanizing AI. This sentence shouldn't make you angry.
> we are still talking about probability built on statistics with extra steps.
There is a wrong assumption here: confusing primitives with emergent properties.
One can't look at the primitivies and assume that certain properties will not emerge. It would be exactly like looking at aminoacids and state that intelligence can't develop from them.
> You pointing at a human brain does not change that an AI agent is not intelligent and cannot think
That depends on the definition of intelligence and thinking, and it is dishonest not to give any definition (and most importantly, one that is not human-centered).
AIs are currently fulfilling several aspects of intelligence and thinking, by any defition of intelligence. If you don't notice that, it's just because you have informed yourself enough. Having said that, I don't doubt that there are aspects that AI are lacking (e.g. retention/plasticity/perception), but the line is blurry, and they're advancing (too) fast.
Empathy is actually a very important aspect of the AI problems, but it's not part of intelligence. Sociopaths don't have it, and yet, you wouldn't doubt that they're intelligent.
> It would be exactly like looking at aminoacids and state that intelligence can't develop from them.
We are not talking about what could develop from what we have today. We are talking about what we have today. The focus is not whether intelligence could develop or not from aminoacids. The focus is on the fact that aminoacids are not intelligent.
Maybe in the future we could develop real intelligence starting from the current implementations of AI, but for sure we are not there today.
We need definitions? Let's start small, ok? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
We can start from here, open every link we find and decide what works for us.
Conclusions drawn by scholars, psychologists, learning researchers, younameit, etc. revolves around the following concepts:
There is of course space for artificial intelligence. These broader and more general definitions of intelligence stop at concepts like elaborating data to reach an answer.Concepts like adaptability or evolution are somewhat lost or diluted to adjust the meaning for these new technologies.
> AIs are currently fulfilling several aspects of intelligence and thinking, by any defition of intelligence.
In the linked article there are dozens of definitions linked, and in most of them the current state AI is not considered to have intelligence. Having half of the property is not enough. I can jump, that doesn't make me a basketball player.
Arbitrarily deciding to consider those definitions not valid or "human-centered" because they do not agree with your point of view is possibly worse than cherry picking. It's like asking to change the definition of a word on a dictionary because you do not agree with the meaning.
> It would be exactly like looking at aminoacids and state that intelligence can't develop from them.
You do realize that amino acids exist on a scale some orders of magnitude smaller than the gates we build GPUs out of?
Honestly, this "you could say the same about humans"-argument is getting so tired. A brain neuron is so complicated, we can't even simulate a single one ...
At the very least there is no reason why you should jump to a human brain, of all things.
But the whole argument kinda loses its spice, when you say "well you could say the same about a mouse brain", and you know what happens when you create swarms of 1000s of mice ... super intelligence, right?