Understanding Intelligence in the Age of AI

One thing that this whole era of AI is teaching us is what--

is our idea of what

intelligence is, is not really accurate.

The, uh, the history of AI has been, here's a

task that only humans can do. Like maybe it is read natural language

or win

at chess or solve a math problem. And then one by one,

someone finds some AI algorithm that also does that.

Like, okay, we can now recognize faces.

We can, we can now understand speech and-- But you look at how it's done,

and it doesn't feel like intelligence. Like it's, oh, it was some trick.

You just, you just cobbled together these neural

networks and random algorithm.

Mm-hmm.

And we were looking for some elusive, intelligent way of

thinking, and we don't see it in the tools

that actually solve our goals.

But maybe it's actually because intelligence is not what we think it is.

So like large language models in particular have become

very successful, and a lot of what they're doing

is just predicting the next token,

predicting the next word in a sentence.

And it, it doesn't sound like something which

is intelligent.

Like you ask someone to improvise a speech, and they don't have no

preparation, and

at every moment they're just saying the next word that comes to their mind.

Stream of consciousness dump. Uh, you don't think that this is-- this could

actually work, but it does for LLMs, and maybe that's actually a

lot of what humans do as well.

This response I'm giving you right now is not rehearsed.

I haven't-- I didn't think about it that deeply, but it's--

You can get very far

just by being in the moment and reacting.

Um, it's-- Certainly, there's not...

There's some things that actually do require careful,

deep thought, but you, you

can do a lot of what seemingly seem like intelligent tasks almost by instinct

or by autopilot. Um, um, that's I think one thing that

the age of AI is teaching us, that maybe we're not quite as smart as we

think we

are sometimes.